The
Star Conquerors
By Ben
Bova
THE
JOHN C. WINSTON COMPANY Philadelphia • Toronto
© 1959 by Ben Bova First Edition
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-13109
Made in the United States
of America
To
Rosa, and to Michael . . . who will reach the stars in more than imagination.
Contents
chapter page
1.
The Loss of Scandia ...... 1
2.
The Galaxy Map......................................... • - 23
3.
The Planets of Sol................................................... ....... 43
4.
The New Leader....................................................... ....... 78
5.
The First Battle........................................................ ....... 97
6.
Tavia........................................................................... 123
7.
Allies and Enemies.................................................. ...... 141
8.
Battle for Life ........ 164
9.
The Gamble............................................................... ...... 184
10. Conqueror and Captive............................................ 202
Chapter ƒ The Loss
of Scandia
first
met Geoffrey Knowland in
the last hours of the Siege of Scandia. Of course, I did not know then who he
was, or what he was to become, i The
Saurian troops of the Masters had struck deep into the Terran Confederation,
bypassing several planetary systems at the frontier to attack Scandia. They had
appeared unexpectedly in great numbers and seized the three outer planets of
the Scandian system before the Terran Star Watch could rush its forces to the
area.
Now,
for three weeks the battle had raged for the last remaining planet, Northolm,
the only Earth-like planet in the Scandian system.
Despite
the Star Watch's arrival and the savage defense by the Scandians themselves,
the nonhuman warriors of the Masters remorselessly pressed their attack. Their
space fleets gradually battled the outnumbered Star Watch ships back away from
the planet so diat the Saurians could land troops on Northolm at
l
will,
while the Terrans' attempts to reinforce their garrison were being throttled
down to nothing.
I recognized the pattern only too well.
On
the twenty-third day of the siege the Star Watch Frontier Coordinator ordered
me to lead an evacuation team down to the planet and rescue as many humans as
possible.
The battle was lost.
I took three ships and headed for the last
remaining center of organized resistance. We picked our way through the
Masters' patrol ships without much difficulty and approached the embattled
planet on the night side.
I had never seen Northolm before, but it had
been described to me as a green flowering world, one of the most beautiful in
the Terran Confederation. Now, as our ships glided across the night side of the
planet, all we could make out on our viewscreens was the angry red of flames
licking up out of the darkness.
When
we crossed the terminator into the daylight, our attention was immediately
focused on the battle.
About
ten Star Watch planetary landing ships were still standing on the plastistone
disc of the spaceport. Ringed around them was the shimmering dome of their
energy screen which often flared into patches of brilliant red and orange as
the Saurians' force-beam projectors fired at it.
Around
the erect ships were dozens of smaller aircraft and groundcars. Most of the
spaceport buildings were demolished, and several ships of various kinds were
blasted and smoking, even inside the energy screen.
Outside the screen, the once-green meadowland
was as bare and pockmarked as Terra's own moon. Hundreds of Saurian vehicles
and guns were drawn up around the Terrans as we flashed into view.
Flying
through an energy screen without getting yourself vaporized, and without
letting an enemy follow you inside is a trick requiring careful timing and long
practice. The young Star Watch pilots of our three ships were all veterans,
though, and we zigzagged through the Saurians' ground fire and slipped through
openings in the screen at a prearranged signal from the men inside.
All
three of our ships landed safely, although the last one was damaged by an enemy
missile just before the screen closed again behind it.
I
was met as soon as I set foot on the ground by a young officer.
"I
am Alan Bakerman, special adjutant to the Frontier Coordinator. I have been
sent to organize a withdrawal of our forces," I said. "Will you
please take me to your commanding officer?"
He
tried not to show his feelings, but his whole body seemed to stiffen a little.
He was a native Scan-dian, I realized. He was grimy, his uniform tattered, and
his face looked as though he had not slept or eaten in days. But this was his
planet, and he was fighting for it. Here I was, a stranger, an obvious alien,
telling him that he must abandon his home.
" I'll take you to the
commander, sir," he said curtly.
He
started walking briskly around my ship, toward the other Star Watch vehicles. I
had to half-trot to keep up with him, since he was head and shoulders taller
than I and covered three of my normal strides with his every step.
The energy screen seemed to make the sky
sullenly gray, except for the flashes of brightness in the areas under
bombardment.
"How
is the screen holding up?" I asked, mostly in an effort to slow him.
He
turned his head my way but did not slacken his pace. "It's all right,
sir," he said. "Absorbs all the energy blasts the lizards have
squirted at it so far. About all they've been able to do is . . . flat!"
He
hurled himself at me, knocking me to the ground with his own heavy frame right
on top of me. Just as we hit there was a ground-rattling explosion. Clods of
dirt and debris pelted down on us.
After
a few lifetime-long moments, he got up and offered me a hand.
"Sorry, sir. Enemy
missile."
I
struggled up with his help and took a deep breath to see if his weight had
cracked any of my ribs.
"Quite
all right. You probably saved my life. Thank you."
"It's
just as I was about to say, sir," he resumed his walking, but at a slower
pace, "the only thing the lizards have been able to get through the energy
screen is a missile once in awhile. They overload one small area of the screen
with force beams, then smash a missile through. The screen can't absorb all the
radiation and still resist the solid body."
I
nodded. And it is only a matter of time until they bring in missiles with
nuclear warheads to wipe out the whole area, I thought.
"Here
we are, sir," my guide said, pointing to one of the spaceships.
We walked to the tail fins and he grasped a
rung of the battered ladder that dangled from the ship's lowest hatchway.
"All
the elevators are stopped, sir, so they can put full power into the energy
screens."
"Screens?" I
asked.
"Yes,
sir. Each ship has an individual screen to protect it against the missiles.
The screen runs along the ship's hull, sir."
«t 99
I see.
We
climbed up the ladder, were admitted through the hatch, and clambered through
several levels of decks before reaching our destination. All the Terrans we met
on the way looked much like my guide: tall, big-shouldered, thick-chested,
dirty, tired but undefeated fighting men. They all towered above my modest
height, and they seemed to regard me as something of a curiosity.
Finally,
we walked down a short passageway and stopped at an unmarked door.
"In there, sir."
"Thank you."
I opened the door and walked
in.
It
was an austere little compartment with a view-screen on one wall, star charts
and planetary maps on the others. A rumpled bunk, a closet, a small, bare desk,
and two chairs were the only furniture. There was another door on the wall to
my left.
Before
I could decide whedier or not to sit down, this second door opened and Geoffrey
Knowland stepped in.
I was first struck by his youth—he was
probably no older than twenty Earth-years. He wore a gray fatigue uniform
without insignia, so I could not tell his rank.
He
was small for a Terran, not much bigger than I. But he crackled with nervous
energy . . . just having him stride into the room like that seemed to trigger a
mental shock wave in me.
Beneath
the tenseness of the strain he was under, his features were thin and
delicate—almost feminine. But his piercing dark eyes were alert and
intelligent.
"I'm
Geoffrey Knowland, Junior Staff Officer," he said, waving me to a chair.
"You are in command
here?" I blurted.
He
nodded as he sat at the desk. "The Planetary Commandant was killed six
days ago as we retreated to this position. I'm the only J.S.O. left who's still
on his feet . . . aside from the native militia, and they're under Star Watch
jurisdiction."
"I see. . . . Uh, my
name is Alan Bakerman."
"That's a Terran name,
but you don't look Terran."
"I
am not," I admitted. "I am Rh'khour'mnin . . . my name in my own
language is Ahgh'loun B'khrom mnin. . . ."
He laughed. "Okay, Alan Bakerman it is.
No Terran could pronounce your language."
"I
fled my homeworld last year and sought refuge in the Terran
Confederation," I explained. "The Star Watch Frontier Coordinator
accepted me as a special adjutant, since I am familiar with some aspects of the
Masters and the Saurians."
He
eyed me quizzically. "The Frontier Coordinator? Is he here?"
"We arrived with a squadron of ships
yesterday, but were unable to reach the planet."
"The Saurians' fleet
stopped him?"
"Yes.
It was a vicious battle. We lost about a hundred ships of all types, and they
must have suffered even greater damage. But they proved we would be unable to
reinforce Northolm further. So I have been sent to organize a withdrawal."
"How soon?"
"Immediately," I
answered.
He ran a hand through his black,
close-cropped hair. "Well, I'm afraid we can't evacuate immediately."
"But you are ordered to!"
He shook his head. "Sorry, but it will
take several hours—maybe longer—before we can leave this planet." I could
not believe it.
This
young, high-strung junior officer was telling me he would stay on the planet.
Surrounded, outnumbered by at least ten to one, he still planned to hold his
position.
"But why?" I
asked.
"Two
nights ago I sent out a volunteer corps of Star Watchmen and Scandians to
create as big a diversion as possible behind the Saurians' lines. They're now
fighting their way back here. We can't leave until they return."
"Your
orders did not authorize you to counterattack the invaders. It's suicide!"
He
smiled wearily. "Since the Planetary Commandant was killed, we've
received no orders except to hold on as best we can. Well, the only way we've
been able to hang on to even this little patch of real estate was to send the
diversionary corps out to stir up a ruckus in the enemy's rear. Those men are
all volunteers. I told them that if they could fight their way back here, we'd
be waiting for them. So I can't upship and leave them."
I stared at him. He was deadly serious.
"But
don't you realize," I tried to persuade, "that the Saurians are
already firing missiles through your defensive screen? It's probably only a
matter of minutes before they nuclear-bomb the whole area.. . ."
"They've
already tried it," he said calmly. "That's why we have the individual
screens on each ship. We can withstand anything except a direct hit by a fusion
bomb."
He
stood up and paced across the cabin. "Still, you're right. It's only a
matter of time until we're wiped out. But I've given my word to the men I sent
out. We'll have to sit tight until they return."
"7/ they return," I corrected.
"Yes," he answered quietly.
"If."
He
stared at the blank viewscreen for a long moment, his dark eyes so intent it
seemed as though he were trying to see through the ship's hull and out across
the horizon to where his men were fighting.
"Well,"
he said finally, "we might as well go up to the control deck."
"Certainly, Officer Knowland."
"No
need for such fonnality," he smiled. "Call me Jeff."
"Very well. If you will call me
Alan." "Sure, Alan. So long as I don't have to pronounce it in your
language."
We left the cabin and climbed up a narrow
ladderway to the control deck. It was a compact maze of viewscreens,
instrument consoles, and automatic computers, all bathed in the eerie greenish
glow of the ship's emergency lighting system. In this perch, high in the nose
of the ship, Jeff had his energy screen controls, missile trackers and
force-beam projectors, communications equipment, and navigation and piloting
instruments all at his fingertips.
The
viewscreens circling the compartment gave a panorama of the scene outside: the
Star Watch ships, the shimmering haze of the energy screen, the flashes of
enemy force beams.
There
were about twenty men at the various stations of the control deck, and Jeff
made the rounds of them all, calling each one by name, talking to them calmly
and quietly, easing their tensions, yet at the same time checking on every
detail of the situation around us.
But
as time dragged on I grew more and more anxious.
"Jeff,
how long are you going to wait for your volunteers?" I asked.
He
glanced at his wrist watch. "Give them another two hours."
"Two
more hours? You were supposed to evacuate this position almost three hours ago.
How long do you think the Frontier Coordinator can hold his fleet in waiting
for you?"
Those
dark eyes lanced at me. "He'll wait. If he were in the same position he'd
do the same thing."
"Technically, you're
disobeying orders," I said.
Jeff made no reply.
The clock's hands crawled
with agonizing slowness, while the Saurian missiles landed more and more frequently inside the
energy screen. Two of the standing ships were hit, but only slightly damaged.
The screen itself was flaring into deep blues and violet now, as the invaders'
force beams steadily rose in intensity. Soon, I knew, the screen would buckle
into dead black and collapse under the terrific drenching of sub-nuclear power
the Saurians were pouring into it.
"Slimy
lizards," I heard Jeff mutter as he watched the wavering dials which
showed the strain the energy screen was under.
"They call themselves
the Family," I said absently.
"What?"
"The Saurians . . . the Masters' troops.
Isn't that what you were talking about?" "Yes."
"They stand erect on their hind legs and
tail . . . about your height. Their forelegs have clawlike hands, although they
run on all fours when excited. They consider themselves a single family,"
I explained, "and every member of the race is related to every other
member. Their original home was in a globular star cluster near the center of
the galaxy—but they have been serving the Masters for so long that they have
established themselves on millions of planetary systems."
"How
do you know so much about them?" Jeff asked.
I
could not tell if his expression was simple curiosity or suspicion. Several of
the other men within earshot had turned toward me, and they all seemed to be
openly hostile.
"I told you I was
Rh'khour'mnin," I said.
"But you're still a human," one of
the men countered, "not a lizard."
"Yes
..." I had gone this far, I
thought, I might as well tell them the rest. "But I was raised by the
Family."
"Raised
by them?" Jeff echoed their single thought. I nodded.
Just
then the communications tech leaped from his seat. "Hey! It's them! It's
the volunteers . . . they're on their way in!"
Jeff
reached the communications console in two strides, ahead of everyone else.
On
the screen was the weak, flickering image of a red-haired, square-jawed Star
Watch officer.
"We're
being closely pursued ... if you let
the screen down, they're gonna jump right in with us. . .."
"Don't
worry," Jeff snapped. "We'll take them in with you and close the
screen behind you again. Then we'll fight them off and you can board the
ships."
The
image on the screen distorted wildly, then went dead.
"Enemy
interference," the communications tech mumbled, as his hands flicked over
the controls.
The
officer's picture returned to the screen, but his voice was drowned out by
screaming, wheezing static. He seemed to be saying something of great urgency.
"Come
on, establish audio contact." Jeff clenched his hands on the back of the
tech's seat.
".
. . not lizards," the officer's voice broke through. "Do you
understand me? The troops following us are not lizards, they're humans. Humans
fighting for the Masters."
The screen went dead again.
"No use." The tech shook his head.
"They're too close to the lizards' jammers now."
"Humans fighting for
the Masters," Jeff repeated.
"I
... I have never heard of human
troops serving the Masters," I said.
Several of the Terrans were
watching me uneasily.
Jeff looked at me for a
long moment.
"Well,"
he said abruptly, "we don't have time to worry about that now."
He
turned back to the communications tech and began dictating orders for embarking
the returning men:
"Ships
three, four, and five will lift the energy screen in their quadrant. The men
will be closely followed by enemy troops—humanoids—and there will be a fight
when our men attempt to leave their vehicles and board the ships. The screen
must be re-established as soon as possible to prevent the enemy from rushing
more troops through. ..."
While
he issued the orders, I walked across the compartment to the viewscreen showing
the area the men would be coming through. In a few minutes Jeff joined me and
put a hand on my shoulder.
"You
said you never heard of human troops serving the Masters. I believe you."
I
turned to say something, but there was nothing I could put into words. He
smiled at me.
"If
the Star Watch Frontier Coordinator trusts you, I guess I can," he said.
Then he returned to the communications console.
Trust
is a rarity in war. And for a Terran to have faith in an alien under such
trying circumstances was the act of either an irresponsible fool or of a person
of much greater depth and understanding than I had believed possible for
someone of Jeff's youth.
In
either case, Geoffrey Knowland was an unusual man.
Within minutes, the aircars of the returning
men started to show up on the horizon, flitting through the lancing beams of
enemy fire and buzzing toward our ships. Swarming around each aircar were
dozens of smaller fliers.
One
section of the energy screen went down as planned, and a fearful confusion
unfolded before my eyes as I watched
the battle take shape on the viewscreens.
The
Terrans—Star Watchmen and Scandians—were landing their aircars about halfway
between the nearest ships and the edge of the energy screen. As they jumped
out of their grounded vehicles, I increased the magnification on my viewscreen
and watched the enemy attack.
The
smaller fliers turned out to be one-man machines: Projectile-shaped cylinders
with some sort of saddle in which sat an immense humanoid, bigger even than the
biggest Terran.
These
strange warriors wore brightly-colored body armor, and evidently their little
vehicles had individual energy screens, because the Terran force beams fired
from the ships did not affect them.
The
warriors plowed through the Terrans like cavalry through foot soldiers,
striking with machine pistols, grenades, and huge double-edged swords. As the
melee grew more and more confused, with men of both sides mixing everywhere,
the enemy troops relied more heavily on their swords, which could slash a man
in two with a single terrifying sweep.
The
Terran force-beam projectors were useless, but the enemy's individual energy
screens were not strong enough to stop solid bodies. The Terrans fought back
with their own rapid-fire side arms, turned empty rocket launchers into clubs,
clawed at the mounted enemy with their bare hands and hopelessly inadequate
combat knives.
In
the wild hand-to-hand battle, the Terrans were being swarmed under, and as more
aircars landed the enemy warriors hit the men as they tried to get out of the
hatches and fired grenades into the overcrowded ships. Meanwhile, whole
battalions of Saurian troops were pouring through the gap in the energy screen and
heading for the nearest of the spaceships.
All
this took place in less than a minute, and as I watched, horrified, I heard
Jeff's voice crackling behind me:
"All
personnel not absolutely needed for skeleton maintenance of the ships are to
counterattack the enemy. Put as many men as possible into antigrav suits. Drop
concussion grenades on the lizard units that are clear of our men. Let's movel"
I
turned in time to see Jeff dive through the hatchway and disappear below deck,
followed by almost half the men in the compartment. I went to join them, but
was stopped by one of the Terrans.
"The
commander said you were to remain here and assume command of the ships at your
discretion."
A
pretty move! I am under orders to get these ships off the planet as soon as
possible. Jeff is countermanding those orders to rescue his volunteers. So he
puts me in command while
he takes as many men as he can to save what is left of the volunteers. If I
follow orders and upship, I must leave him and most of his men behind.
All
I could do was watch the battle, helpless to
move until one side or the other was annihilated.
Slowly,
I was able to make some order out of the wild,
confused struggle. The Terrans had gradually grouped themselves into tiny knots
of men, huddled close to the blasted aircars, battling the mounted enemy
hand-to-hand. The biggest clump of resistance seemed to center around a tall,
red-haired Terran, possibly the one I had
seen earlier in the viewscreen. He had taken a sword from a fallen enemy and
was wielding it with deadly efficiency.
Just
then Jeff and his reinforcements leaped into view. Most of them were in
antigrav suits, looking like flying robots, raking the Saurian battalions with
explosives, then diving down on the airborne humanoids.
As
the deadly battle seesawed back and forth I noticed that no more troops or
aircars were coming through the energy screen. It had been closed.
Then
I spotted Jeff again, leading a charge of his
flying Star Watchmen, smashing right into the mounted enemy troops, firing his
automatic pistol only when he was too close to miss.
One
by one the humanoids were being knocked off their flying horses and overwhelmed
by the battered but still defiant men on the ground.
And
then suddenly it was ended. There were no more enemy troops left standing.
Quickly, the surviving Terrans staggered toward the ships, dragging their
wounded with them, leaving their dead behind.
As the first of them reached the hatches,
enemy missiles began punching through the energy screen and blasting the area
with high explosives and shrapnel.
"All
ships prepare for immediate take-off," I commanded, and the
communications tech relayed my order.
A
tremendous explosion rocked the ship and blanked out all the viewscreens.
"Nuclears,"
someone muttered.
"All
ships signal they're ready for take-off," the tech called out.
Another blast. Closer.
There
is no one left alive outside the ships now, I thought. Aloud, I ordered,
"All ships up. Full speed. Close formation. Keep the energy screen as
intact as possible."
The
only noticeable motion was a slight vibration as the subnuclear drive field
took over the ship. The viewscreen cleared, and I could see that we were already through most of the planet's atmosphere.
"We
couldn't've taken another blast like that last one," the chief engineer
said to no one in particular.
"Good timing on your
take-off."
I
turned to see Jeff climbing through the hatchway, his antigrav suit stained and
muddied, a pistol dangling at his hip and one of those huge broadswords
clenched in his right hand.
It
was not until I saw him that I realized how close he had come to death.
"I was half afraid_____ "
"Those
nuclear blasts?" He grinned. "No, we were all aboard the ships before
they hit. Close, though. Too close."
The Masters' ships made a halfhearted attack
at our formation as we left the planet, but it was clear that they only wanted
to be certain we would leave the area.
When
our battered little squadron reached the main Star Watch fleet we transferred
from the planetary landing ships to the fleet's deep-space cruisers. Maintenance
techs took the ships back to the repair vehicles.
Within
six hours the fleet was in superlight overdrive, and I was asleep in a spare
bunk aboard Jeff's cruiser.
When I awoke, there was a message on the
cabin's phonotape to report as soon as possible to the Frontier Coordinator. I
rushed through the autoshower and dressed quickly. As I stepped into the
passageway outside, I bumped into Jeff and the red-haired officer. Both were
in immaculate black and silver Star Watch uniforms.
"Going
to the Frontier Coordinator?" Jeff asked. I nodded.
"We've
been summoned, too. Oh, this is Captain Terrance Radnor, the Star Watchman who
led the volunteer raid against the invaders."
"A
courageous undertaking," I said. The captain was indeed the man I had seen
in the viewscreen and during the battle. He was very big, even for a Terran,
with a broad, heavy-boned frame, and thickly muscled.
His
square face was set in an angry line and his green eyes smoldered at me.
"We'd
have beaten those filthy lizards if it hadn't been for those humanoid traitors.
We had fought all the way to their main landing base when the human-oids hit
us."
I shook my head. "I can't imagine who
they are or what part of the galaxy they come from. I never realized the
Masters. ..."
"You
lived under the Masters until a year ago, and you didn't know about them?"
he demanded.
"Now wait a minute. .
. ." Jeff stepped between us.
But
Terrance pushed him back. "Well, how do we know you're telling the truth?
If one race of humans will fight against us, how do we know you're on our
side?"
I
answered as evenly as possible, "Because I say I am. I have placed my life
in the hands of the Terran Confederation. I have left my people to fight
against the Masters. If you don't trust me, it would be a simple enough matter
for you to kill me."
"This
has gone far enough," Jeff said. "Terry, there are some limits to the
amount of stupidity a Star Watch officer can show in public. Alan, I must ask
you to excuse Terry's behavior. He's a Scandian and his family is still on
Northolm."
"I
understand," I said. "My family is living under the Masters,
also."
Terrance said nothing.
The
three of us continued our trip to the flagship in embarrassed silence. The
fleet had come out of overdrive for a navigational check, and we transshipped
from Jeff's cruiser to the Frontier Coordinator's in a shuttle rocket.
The
Frontier Coordinator was fifty Earth-years old, not quite middle-aged for a
Terran. But he looked older. His hair was all gray, his eyes tired, his broad
shoulders bent. As we entered his office, he was sitting at a desk piled high
with reports. His stiff tunic collar was unfastened, and he was puffing on an
ancient pipe.
This
was this same man who, twenty years earlier, had made the first contact between
the Terran Confederation and a nonhumanoid race: the Family. It had been a
peaceful contact at first, but for the past ten years sporadic raids and
frontier clashes had been gradually building in violence and intensity until
now the Confederation found itself fighting an undeclared war.
And losing it.
The
three of us stood at attention before the Coordinator's desk. He told us to
relax, and asked to hear Terrance's report of his raid against the invaders.
Terrance
repeated substantially what he had already told Jeff and me earlier, but with a
little more detail: the detachment had broken through the Saurians' ring around
the spaceships fairly easily and lost themselves in the wooded hills a few
miles from the spaceport.
They
were not pursued—evidently the Saurians assumed that the raiders were merely
deserting the surrounded Terran stronghold. Terrance and his men kept well
away from enemy forces until they were within striking distance of the
invaders' main landing point. Here were the principal enemy communications and
supply centers.
The
Terrans struck the landing area's outer defenses and crashed through, only to
meet the humanoid troops who had probably just landed on the planet. There was
a tremendous battle, the Terrans holding their own until their power supplies
and ammunition started to run low.
When
the raiders tried to retreat, the humanoids followed them, and a running battle
ensued. The battle was not ended until the terrible ordeal back at the ships.
"If
it hadn't been for the humanoids, sir," Terrance concluded, "I'm
certain we could have destroyed the lizards' landing base and completely
disrupted their whole attack on die planet."
The
Frontier Coordinator nodded and sucked on his pipe. "My staff officers
will probably want a detailed written report, captain," he said.
"Thank you for your cooperation."
Terrance saluted and left
the compartment.
The
Coordinator looked at me. "I suppose someone should tell him he's due for
a medal. Scant return for losing his home, though."
"I'll tell him,
sir," Jeff said.
The
older man nodded. "Later. Right now you can tell me what kind of audacity
it is that sends five thousand men out to attack fifteen hundred thousand, and
then refuses to obey an order to retreat."
Jeff's face colored.
"This is a war, youngster, not military
games. The men who died today are dead forever." "I know that,
sir."
"Then
what was your reasoning?" the Coordinator asked, rising from his desk. I'm
assuming, of course, that you did some thinking about what you were
doing."
"Yes, sir."
"Well?"
"Sending
out the diversionary force was the only thing that allowed us to hang on to the
spaceport for as long as we did."
"And your refusal to evacuate when my
special
adjutant relayed my orders to you, after arriving with three extra ships to
help load every possible man aboard?"
"I
was waiting for the return of the diversionary force, sir."
"Very
noble of you," the Coordinator said, while walking around the desk.
"Sir,"
I interrupted, "I'm just as much to blame as this officer. . . ."
"You stay out of this,
Alan."
"But
I gave a tacit approval to his plan to wait. I could have insisted that he obey
your orders at once, but I did not."
"This
boy was in command of the garrison, not you," he snapped. Then he turned
back to Jeff. "How many men did you have under your command just before
the volunteer detachment left the ships?"
"Fifteen
ships with about two hundred men per ship, plus what was left of the planetary
militia— between eight and ten thousand men all together," Jeff answered.
"And
you sent more than half your command out to create a diversion," the
Coordinator said, half-sitting on the edge of his desk directly in front of
Jeff. "How many men do you have left now?"
Jeff
met the older man's iron-hard gaze and snapped, "Exactly six thousand one
hundred and forty-two, including the wounded."
"So
you lost between two and four thousand men for a few hours' glory."
"Glory!"
Jeff exploded. "If you think I was having fun down there. . . ."
"Quiet!" the
Coordinator commanded. "Now listen to me, son. You were in command of a
rear guard action. All you had to do was hold on until we had gathered our
scattered ships and were ready to leave the system. Instead you counterattacked
and lost almost four thousand men." "But. . . ."
"No
buts, not in war. Whatever your conscious motives for sending out that suicide
squad, I know you well enough to be certain that you had a daydream somewhere
in your head about driving the invaders completely off the planet. Well, all
you did was lose a lot of men who might have lived to fight another day if you
had kept your emotions under control and obeyed orders."
Jeff
was trembling, and his face was set in a frozen white mask.
"Are you through,
sir?"
"Yes.
Go back to your ship and think over what I said."
Jeff
snapped into a letter-perfect salute, turned on his heel and strode to the
door. As he opened it, the Coordinator called out to him, "This was your
first command, Jeff. You came close to being wiped out. And I came close to
losing a son. Do you understand?"
Jeff
did not turn around, but the stiffness of his spine eased a little.
"Yes," he
answered softly. "I understand, Dad."
Only
then did I realize that the Star Watch Frontier Coordinator was Jeff's father.
Chapter 2 The Galaxy Map
s
the door closed behind Jeff, I must have been showing my surprise quite openly.
"Didn't you know he was my son?"
Heath Knowland asked. I shook my head. "I should have realized it from the
name, of course. But it never occurred to me. I thought Knowland was a common
Terran name. . . ."
"It
is," he said. He walked around behind his desk and picked up his pipe
lighter. Sitting, he puffed the pipe to life again. "What do you think of
him?"
"Of
Jeff? I've only known him for a day and a half. . .?
"That's
enough for you," the Coordinator said. "I've seen you use your
extrasensory perceptions to size up men I've known all my life, in a single
meeting."
"My
e.s.p. powers are no greater than yours," I begged off. "It's just
that I Ve been taught to use them, and you Terrans still apply them only
instinctively."
Knowland
grinned at me. "All right. I still want to know what you think of my
son."
23
"He is an unusual boy," I said.
"Tremendous mental energies . . . you can sense that just by being in the
same room with him. He is already a good leader of men. Although you regard his
strategy on Northolm as foolhardy, he nearly won the planet back for you . . .
and when things went bad he didn't panic, but stood his ground and saved as
many of his men as possible. I think you were too harsh with him."
Heath
Knowland puffed a huge cloud of smoke, which drifted in silence to the air
circulator and was sucked into its grilled face.
"I
know I'm rough on the boy," he said finally, "but there are reasons.
First off, he's my son. Any hint of special treatment would cause a collapse of
morale ... and, by the nine moons of
Saturn, you know as well as I that morale is all we have to go on against the
Masters."
"But perhaps. . .
."
He
waved me down. "Another thing, and more important to the boy's own
future, is that he's a dreamer. He's in the middle of a war—a real, killing,
no-holds-barred war—and he daydreams. He had no more chance of driving the
invaders off Northolm than I have of defeating the combined fleets of the
Masters. But he can't accept that. I've got to drive it home to him that
there's no room or time for dreaming any more . . . he's got to be a man, not a
boy."
"How old is he?"
I asked.
"I
know, I know . . . it's a crime to force a youngster barely out of his teens to
grow up immediately." He leaned across the desk and jabbed his pipe at me,
"But I need him. I need those mental energies and his capacity for
leadership. I need all the men like him that
I
can lay my hands on. And if I have to make the road rough for him, I'll do it.
Because if I don't he's going to end up dead . . . and soon."
He
sat back and took a deep breath. He seemed to be thinking over what he had just
said to make certain it was what he had meant to express.
At
length he said to me, "There's going to be an emergency session of the
Terran Confederation Council next month back on Earth. They're meeting to try
to establish a policy for handling the Masters' attacks."
"Your plan will be up
for consideration?"
"It
had better be. I'm going to present it to the Council by tri-di broadcast. But
to make certain it doesn't get pushed aside in favor of some politician's
cure-all scheme, I'm sending Jeff to the meeting. It'll also give him rest from
fighting, and it'll be a chance for him to see his mother and his friends back
home."
I nodded.
"I'd
like you to accompany him, Alan. I can't go with him myself, but I want someone
else from my staff along. And your background may be useful to him."
"I see. Of course. I'd
be glad to."
The
next day I transshipped my belongings from the Frontier Coordinator's
city-sized, globular command ship to Jeff's smaller, saucer-shaped battle
cruiser.
Jeff's
ship, with three escort pickets and a half-dozen scoutships, left the main Star
Watch fleet and headed for Terra almost as soon as the hatch closed behind me.
Within six hours we had built up enough velocity to switch over to the
superlight overdrive.
I
did not see much of Jeff during the first two days of the flight. The first day
I stayed in my cabin and caught up on my rest. But the second day I began to
get bored. Time is dimensionless in space, especially when you are traveling
faster than light and can't see anything outside the ship.
So
I started to putter around the ship, probing here and there to pass the hours.
I
was walking down one of the narrow passageways when Terrance popped out of a
doorway and nearly knocked into me.
"Oh... hello." He looked a bit flustered
at meeting me so unexpectedly.
"Hello,
captain," I said. He was standing so close to me that I almost had to bend
my neck over backward to look up at his face.
"I
. . . uh . . . look, do I call you 'sir* or what? Just what is your rank?"
I laughed. "I have no real rank. You may
call me Alan if you want to."
"Okay."
He grinned back at me. "And I'm Terry. Uh . . . I'm sorry about my
flare-up a few days ago. I was. . . ."
"I'd forgotten
it," I said.
He
beamed. "Thanks. Say, would you like to look over the ship? That's what
I've been doing. Never been aboard a cruiser of this type before. On Scandia we
have . . ." his face clouded, "we . . . had . . . older ships."
"Yes,
I'd like to see the ship," I said as brightly as possible.
Within
a few minutes Terrance perked up again. He took me through the entire ship,
starting at the edge of the disc and working inward, until finally we stood at
the very center where the mammoth engines
and
generators were rumbling their mighty song of power.
Terrance
launched into an impressive-sounding but totally incomprehensible explanation
of how the ship was propelled at speeds greater than light.
"The
drive field accelerates every subnuclear particle of the ship . . . this
eliminates inertia and makes superlight speeds possible," he concluded.
I must have looked puzzled.
"You
see, for centuries it was thought that nothing in the universe could go faster
than light. But if the ship is inertialess, you can zip right past light-speed
and go as fast as you want to. Of course, some physicists claim that when you
go faster than light you're not really in this universe at all.. . but when you stop to see where you
are, you're back here again."
It
was obvious that he was making it plain enough to be understood by any Terran.
He looked at me expectantly, as though he knew the light of truth was about to
dawn on my face.
I
felt more or less obligated to ask him a question. "Ummm ... how fast can you go? What is your
limit?"
He
smiled. "In theory, there's no known limit. Of course, it takes about six
hours to accelerate to light-speed, but after that the only limitation you're
under is a practical one—you can't tell where you're going unless you can see
where you are. So you have to stop and make navigational checks."
"I
see." And I did—that much at least. "How often must you do
this?"
"Well,
official Star Watch practice is to stop at least once every twenty-four hours.
That's Terran hours. We keep time in space by Terran standards. The longest
superlight run on record is six days: a hundred and forty-four hours. In that
time the ship went from the Star Watch's Prime Base on Mars to the Regulus
system—about seventy light-years."
"That is almost a
light-year every two hours," I said.
"Yep,"
Terry nodded. "They were about five light-years off course when they came
out of overdrive . . . but that's not bad for dead reckoning."
I agreed.
As
we walked back to the officers' quarters I asked, as indirectly as possible,
where Jeff had been for the past two days. Terrance said he had seen little of
him.
"Usually,
when he's not busy with anything else, he's working on his map."
"Map?" I asked.
"Uh-huh.
He'll probably be at officers' mess tonight ...
he was last night. Ask him to show it to you. It's his pride and joy."
I
stayed with Terrance until the evening meal was served, and we sat together in
the executive officers' dining room. It was a small room just off the main mess
hall.
We
sat at a round table with four other officers whom Terrance introduced. About
halfway through the meal, the red-haired Scandian nudged my elbow and shot to
attention. The others quickly rose, too. Jeff had just come in.
"At
ease—sit down," he told us. "No need for formalities. Making your
officers stand at attention in the middle of their dinner doesn't gain you any
respect."
There
were two empty chairs at the table and Jeff sat at the one nearest Terrance and
myself. He dialed his selection and punched the order key.
"How ve you been, Alan? I haven't seen
you since we left the fleet."
"Fine,"
I said. "Terry has been showing me your ship."
"Oh,
yes. It's the first time aboard for both of you, isn't it?"
Terrance
looked up from his sea vegetables. "Yep, we're both taking the Terran rest
cure."
Jeff's
eyes darted to the big captain. "I am, too, I guess."
His
meal came out on a servotable and we all ate in silence. Afterward, as we were
leaving the dining room, I said to Jeff:
"Terrance
tells me that you've been working on a map of some sort."
"Why, yes," he
said. "Would you like to see it?"
"I'm very
curious."
He
led me past the officers' quarters in toward the center of the ship. We went
down a ladder into the cargo deck where the ship's supplies, replacement parts,
and extra equipment were stored.
"I've
commandeered a fairly large compartment," Jeff explained, "although I
practically had to throw the ship's quartermaster overboard. He's an old war
dog .. . and to hear him tell it, the
ship can't function at all unless everything is done the way he wants it."
Jeff
was walking slightly in front of me as we went down the dimly-lighted
passageway, but I could see the expression on his face. He had started out grinning
about the quartermaster, but his mouth tightened and his eyes grew somber as he
thought it over.
"I
guess there are some disadvantages to having your own ship so young," he
said finally.
"Do many Star Watch officers receive
commissions at your age?" I asked.
He
glanced back at me. "Quite a few, especially with the fighting getting
harder all the time. Terry, for instance . . . he's a year older than I and was
commissioned a year ahead of me. But he was second-in-command of a whole
squadron when the lizards hit Scandia." I see.
"Of
course," Jeff mused, half to himself, "Terry isn't the son of Heath
Knowland. He's just another officer."
We came to a door and Jeff
opened it.
"Here we are," he
said as the lights came on.
It
nearly filled the entire room; an immense, softly glowing disc seemingly
suspended in mid-air so that its curving edge hung over our heads as we stood
by the doorway. As I stared at its translucent mass, I thought I saw tiny
flickers of light deep within it.
"Come
on up on the catwalk," Jeff said, indicating a stairway that led up to
another level.
At
the top of the stairs was a small, railed platform that circled the room. A
desk-sized electronic console stood nearby.
From
this vantage point I could see Jeff's map more clearly. It was an immense
flattened disc, thick in the center and gradually thinning out toward the edge.
Dark belts of opaque material spiraled through the outer reaches, but the
bulging nucleus was clear and bright.
"The
galaxy," Jeff said softly. In the stillness of the big room his voice
echoed hollowly.
"Kh'rtym p'thar," I said, then translated, "the Wheel of
Light."
Jeff
nodded. "It's been called the Milky Way on Earth since time immemorial . .
. they didn't realize at first that it was a hundred billion stars shining on
them."
"Rh'khour'mnin
is a cluster of stars," I explained. "On most of our planets the
galaxy cannot be seen because the nearby stars are too bright and too close
together. It was not until we reached the outer edges of our cluster that we
realized how many stars there were."
Jeff
sat down at the console and flicked his fingers across the controls.
"The
map—or model, if you want to call it that— is made of electrically-sensitive
plastic crystals. I can light any crystal or group of them from the controls
here."
"Did you build all
this yourself?"
"Jupiter,
no." He laughed. "It took a team of techs six weeks to brew up this
batch of plastic. What I'm trying to do is fix every star known by man on this
map. It's a matter of locating the position of the star, spotting it in the
proper place on the map, then electronically charging the crystal in that position
and setting up the circuitry on the control console here so that I can turn a
dial and punch a button and get my star to shine in the right place."
"A tedious
business," I said.
"Time-consuming
all right. Just to make the job interesting, I try to tune the crystal so that
it will glow in the same color as the star it represents: yellow for Sol, blue
for Acheraar, white for Vega, red for Betelgeuse. . . ."
He
toyed with the controls as he spoke, and the stars he named appeared in the
map.
"Of
course, when you come to the big globular clusters of stars, all I can give you
is the general color of the over-all cluster. I'm not going to spend my life
trying to sort out the colors of ten thousand stars!"
"No, I suppose
not."
Jeff
laughed as he punched more buttons. Several of the big globular clusters around
the center of the galaxy materialized in the map. One of them, I knew, was the
home of the Saurians. Another, the home cluster of the Masters. But there were
hundreds of such clusters ... all of
them more than twenty thousand light-years from Sol.
"Do
you know the Star Watch coordinates for your home system?" Jeff asked.
I
told him, and he looked surprised. "Why, that's the Seven Sisters . . .
The Pleiades."
"Yes,
I should imagine the brighter of our stars would be observable from
Terra."
"Sure,"
Jeff said, making the Rh'khour'mnin stars appear in his map, "we know the
Pleiades: three hundred and fifty light-years from Terra; about three hundred
stars in a volume twenty light-years across; mostly very hot, blue, giant
stars, with a lot of glowing hydrogen gas in between them. Right?"
"Almost,"
I said. "Actually, you can't see the dimmer stars in the group; there are
really five hundred and seventeen stars. Two hundred and thirty-six of them
have planetary systems supporting human life."
Jeff leaned an elbow on top of the console
and cradled his chin in his hand. "And which star does your homeworld
belong to . . . not one of the blue giants, is it?"
I smiled. "What makes
you think not?"
"Well.
. . your coloring: your skin's sort of tawny, and your hair's almost the color
of copper, even your eyes are yellowish. Your planet must be cool and cloudy
because you're built to absorb every bit of solar radiation that reaches you.
If you were born under one of the blue suns, you'd be dark so you could
withstand the intense radiation."
My
estimation of Jeff's intelligence and education went up several notches.
"True,"
I agreed. "I was born on the innermost planet of a red dwarf star. My
homeworld was cool, as you said, but very seldom cloudy . . . the air was
usually too cold to hold much water vapor without precipitating it."
"Lots of snow,
eh?" Jeff said.
I
nodded. "Of course, my memories of my home are vague. I was taken from
there when I was quite young."
"Taken?"
"By
the Saurians ... as I told you
earlier, I was raised by the Family."
Jeff
said nothing, but I knew this was the time and place to tell him about myself
and my people.
"To
begin with," I explained to Jeff, "although we are of the same human
stock, there are many differences between Rh'khour'mnin and Terran. The most
basic difference, of course, is that we come from a star cluster where there is
hardly ever more than two light-years between stars. Sol, by comparison, is
practically alone in
space. In the same volume that holds more than five hundred Rh'khour'mnin
stars, scarcely sixty exist in Sol's neighborhood.
"Secondly,
our lifespans are much longer than yours. A Terran can expect to live to a
hundred and fifty. My expected lifespan is three to four hundred Earth-years.
"So
you can see that it was relatively easy for us to reach out from one planet and
colonize the whole star cluster: the stars were close at hand, and we had long
enough lifespans to be able to travel at speeds less than that of light.
"For you Terrans it was much more
difficult. You had to develop a superlight drive mechanism.
"But picture us .. . expanding at our leisure, masters of all we see—until we
reach the limits of our cluster and suddenly discover that we know only one
small corner of an immense galaxy.
"And
in that galaxy, waiting for us, were the Masters.
"I have never seen the Masters,
themselves. None of my people have. We were contacted by the Saurians, the
Family.
"They showed themselves to us at exactly
the right psychological moment. Just as we were realizing the immensity of the
universe around us, they landed in their superlight ships and told us that they
were representatives of a vastly older, wiser civilization ... a civilization
that stretched from the nucleus of the galaxy to our own insignificant little
cluster of stars.
"They explained that they were servants
of the Masters, and that we, too, would become members of this all-embracing
civilization. We had no choice.
Our
people realized we could never fight such a powerful society, and the Saurians
promised us a share in the galaxy-wide culture of the Masters' civilization.
"And
so we submitted to them five generations ago. That is about five hundred Terran
years.
"At
first the merger must have seemed wonderful. All over our worlds new cities
sprang up, the benefits of new discoveries were lavished on us. The sudden
depression we had suffered when we reached the end of our own ability to
explore and colonize was drowned in the exhilaration of belonging to a
galaxy-wide culture of great age and wisdom.
"But
slowly the truth dawned. Certain of our planets, those revolving about our
brightest, hottest blue stars, were taken over by the Masters. Our people, if
any were populating such a planet, were removed. The planets were reserved for
the Masters only.
"Our
race was gradually being absorbed and devitalized by the Masters.
Increasingly, it became apparent that we existed only to do the Masters' bidding.
Not that they were cruel or overly demanding; but our people's freedom of mind
to follow their own desires in their own way was carefully being drained out of
them.
"I
was born the third son of a planetary ruler. It is customary—now—for families
of certain standing to give a son to the Masters for training. The Saurians
told my family that I was to be given a full education, from the beginning. So
my family dutifully handed me over to them, and I was taken to another Rh'khour-mnin
planet for schooling.
"They trained me well . . . too well. I
was given the best education that the Masters could offer. Every part of my
mind was trained, even to the extent of developing some proficiency with the
latent extrasensory powers that all humans possess.
"But
there came a crisis point. I was to be trained to be a territorial
administrator of a new area which the Masters would soon conquer. In order to
understand the situation fully, and to do my job properly, they had to explain
to me much of the actual history and philosophy of my own people, and of the
Masters' empire.
"It
was a risk, telling me the truth about myself and themselves, but they hardly
considered it as such. They told me enough to make me despise them. But what
could I do? I was a stranger to my own people. I had nothing except what the
Saurians had allowed me to learn. Where could I turn, except to serve the
Masters?
"Then
I realized what I must do. I stole a Saurian ship and fled to the territory
which the Masters planned to conquer next."
Jeff
sat in silence, his thin face set in a grim mask, his eyes burning intently.
"And
that territory marked for conquest is the Terran Confederation," he said
at last.
"Yes,"
I replied. "Now you know why I am with you. Now you know how great your
danger is."
Jeff
looked out at the giant map toward the softly-glowing stars of Rh'khour mnin.
"Does my father know
all this? he asked.
"Yes. Of course."
He toyed with several
controls, then gradually turned a single dial. One great mass of the map began
to gleam brilliantly, then slowly sank into a sullen red glower, stretching
from the center of the galaxy across half the massive disk and engulfing my
home-worlds.
"Just
how far does this empire of the Masters extend?"
"No human knows,"
I said.
Jeff
touched other knobs and buttons and a new set of stars began to appear: a small
oval patch that spread from a single star halfway in from the rim of the galaxy
and grew in all directions until it nearly touched Rh'khour'mnin.
"This
is the Terran Confederation," Jeff explained. "A hundred star systems
in an oval volume of space that's only two hundred light-years across on its
longest diameter."
I
watched the glowing white oval poised on the brink of the crimson spread of the
Masters' empire.
"Two
hundred star systems," Jeff went on, "with a population of more than
a hundred billion humans. Most of them are descendants of Terran explorers and
settlers, like the Scandians. A few of the star systems, like Arcturus,
Procyon, and Vega, were inhabited by humans when the Star Watch first reached
them."
"Then your race is
native to several stars," I said.
"No," Jeff shook
his head. "Just one—Sol."
"But you said. . .
."
"I
said we found humans on other star systems. We did. But we found other things,
too, first in our own Solar system, then on planets circling other suns. Men from Earth
had been there before."
"Your father never
mentioned this."
"No, he wouldn't. But there is plenty of
archeologi-cal evidence . . . and the ancient folk tales of the Vegans even
tell the story, in a scrambled, mythical sort of way."
Jeff
was gazing out at the galaxy map now, but his eyes and thoughts were far, far
back in time.
"It
was once thought that man as a species on Earth was only about a million years
old. Some anthropologists thought it was more like five million years, but
they were a small minority. Then we found that the dead cities and canals on
Mars were built more than a million years ago by humans. This was the first
link. The humans that built on Mars were Earth-like humans: the same size, the
same physical characteristics.
"Then,
as we expanded outward to the farther planets, and finally developed the
superlight drive that enabled us to reach the stars . . . we found more and
more evidence. Man had been there before. He had built an empire more than a
million years ago that stretched as far as we've been able to reach today, and
probably a good deal farther."
"But what happened to
it?" I asked.
Jeff
rose from the desk console and walked to the railing.
"It
was destroyed," he said. "Demolished, wiped out, crushed so
thoroughly that not a shred of evidence was left on Earth."
"But who. .. ."
He
shrugged. "We don't know. All we've been able to piece together is this:
the Terran empire was torn apart by an invader. A monumental war was fought,
and we lost. Human life was stamped out on almost every planet where it existed.
Mars' atmosphere was
blown away; the planet between Mars and Jupiter was blasted apart; Earth,
herself, was scoured clean of human life—they thought. And just to make sure,
Earth was subjected to violent changes in climate . . . what we used to call
the Ice Ages. We found the mechanisms that produced them on one of the moons of
Saturn."
It
was almost too much to digest all at once. The magnitude of what Jeff was
saying was staggering.
"Every
colony world of Earth was wiped clean . . . only a few minor handfuls of humans
escaped the invaders, and they were reduced to primitive savages when their
planets were ravaged. They are the ancestors of those human populations the
Confederation found a million years later.
"On
Earth itself human life must have been reduced to almost nothing. The invaders
did a thorough job of extermination, but just to make certain that no humans
escaped them, they caused the successive climate changes, the Ice Ages. They
thought that no highly-developed species could live through that."
Jeff's
eyes were blazing now, and his fists tightened around the railing until his
knuckles were white with tension.
"But
we survived," he said. "No man will ever know how a few human beings
lived through the ordeal. . . but we survived. We were reduced to the level of
animals again, we had to relearn everything, the whole planet was in turmoil
because of the ice sheets .. . but we
survived. We forgot our heritage, we battled for existence with mammoths and
saber-toothed tigers, we rediscovered agriculture, we relearned civilization ... and we were always haunted by the
stars. We had to
get back among the stars, because up there was our destiny."
He turned to me. "Six hundred years ago
civilized men were just beginning to colonize the western hemisphere of Earth.
Three hundred years later we were colonizing the moon. Today we're out among
the stars again . . . and we know that somewhere among those stars are the
Others."
"The Masters," I
said.
"Perhaps,"
Jeff answered. "We don't know who our ancient enemy was. The closest
description we have of them is from the Vegan folk tales, where they're
described simply as 'fighters' and 'the Others.'"
"Who
else could they be?" I asked. "The Saurians have said that the
Masters have controlled the galaxy for many millions of years."
"Earth-years?"
I
smiled. "I've been living among your people long enough to automatically
translate times into your standards."
"Then
it must be the Masters," Jeff mused. "They crushed us once, and here
we are again."
He
looked out at his map once more, then began pacing along the catwalk.
"Do
you know the plan my father will put before the Council next month?" he
asked me.
"Yes,"
I replied. "He will ask the Council to raise the largest army and build
the biggest fleet the Confederation can afford. Then he proposes to establish
a network of fortresses around the Confederation's frontier. With such defenses
he hopes to make it too costly for the Masters to continue the war."
"What do you think of
the plan?"
I walked back to the console. "I am not
a military expert. .. and I don't
know enough about. . . ."
"I'm
not asking you for an official statement," Jeff cut in. "I'd just
like to know your opinion, as one friend to another."
I
hesitated, then saw that he was serious. "Even if you succeed in
stalemating the Masters militarily," I said, "their culture is so
vast and so superior that they will absorb the Terran Confederation within a
few centuries."
He looked puzzled.
"I
know it is difficult for you to accept, but they are older and wiser than we.
They control billions of star systems. Billions. Your two hundred stars are
insignificant atoms compared to them. They can besiege the entire Terran
Confederation for millenia, if necessary. But, worst of all, they can entice
your people into joining them willingly. . . ."
"How can they do
that?"
"By
offering you the benefits of their civilzation; by showing you all the advances
and comforts they have to offer. By proving to you that you are barbarians—and
you are, even by the standards of my people. How long do you think Terrans
could resist such pressures?"
Jeff grinned. "You
don't know Terrans."
"No,"
I said, "but you have never seen the glories of the Masters'
civilization."
"Well,
if they can do all this so easily, why are they attacking us?"
"I
don't know. Perhaps they first want to prove to you how futile resistance
is."
"Or maybe," Jeff
said, walking back to the railing,
"maybe
it's because we are ancient enemies . . .and they are the Others."
I
said nothing, but watched him as he gazed out on his model of the galaxy. It
was hard to believe that such a seemingly intense and restless youth had the
patience to attempt such a mammoth undertaking. He seemed to be trying to
puzzle out something in his mind; his face was somber, his slim body—dressed in
the black and silver Star Watch uniform—hunched over the railing.
Suddenly
he wheeled back to me. "Why are you fighting the Masters?"
So
that was it. A question of values. "I know that I've made it seem
hopeless," I answered. "But if men did not fight for what they
wanted—regardless of their chance of winning—they would never reach their goal.
I can't live under the Masters, and neither can you. To join the Masters is to
surrender your right to decide how you want to live; to allow them to rule you
means you must give up an essential part of your human nature. The only
alternative we have is to fight them."
Jeff
nodded agreement and turned back to the map. I walked to him and looked again
at the angry red glow of the Masters' empire, stretching from the hub of the
galaxy two-thirds of the way out to the rim. And at its edge was the tiny white
oval of the Terran Confederation.
"This
is our enemy, then," Jeff said. "And this is our battleground."
Chapter 3 The Planets of
Sol
for
the remaining days of our flight back to the Solar system, I practically lived
in the ship's library, reading all the available microspools on Terran history
and anthropology.
Jeff's
summary of his people's background was accurate. As nearly as the Terran
scientists could determine, the First Terran Empire had been wiped out about a
million years ago.
I
searched the records for any hint of who the Others might be. There was none.
But I was convinced that they could only be the Masters.
I
talked with many of Jeff's officers about it, but none of them seemed very
interested. Terrance summed it up best:
"There's
nothing we can do now to change ancient history. Whether or not it was the
Masters who defeated Terra a million years ago doesn't worry me. It's fighting
them now that counts."
43
Within eight days of leaving the main Star
Watch fleet, we dropped out of superlight drive for good and approached the
Solar system at half light-speed. We passed several belts of Terran patrols and
interceptor squadrons, and finally we were requested to land for inspection on
Pluto.
"They're
taking no chances," Jeff said. "They're really frightened."
We
were cleared at Pluto within a day, and here Jeff and I were to part for
awhile. He was going directly to Earth, while I would stop off at the Star
Watch's Prime Base on Mars to deliver some personal reports from the Frontier
Coordinator to the Star Watch Chief Coordinator.
Before
he took off again, Jeff asked me to take a small ship and visit a friend of his
on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
"He's
my former teacher," Jeff explained. "I can't go to see him myself,
but I'd like to send a friend instead of just a tri-di phone message."
So
I flew to Titan in one of the smaller scoutships that had accompanied Jeff's
cruiser.
We landed at the satellite's only spaceport,
a small, lonely clump of buildings ringed around a weathered landing disc and
set against the shoulder of some frozen mountains. Once we were down, we had to
wait for a flexible passage-tube to be connected to the ship's hatch; Titan was
the only satellite in the Solar system with a natural atmosphere, but it
consisted of un-breathable methane and ammonia, so we walked from the ship to
the buildings inside the passage-tube.
When I finally
got to the nearly-deserted buildings, Jeff's teacher, Sydney Lee, was there
waiting for me.
I
had never seen an aged Terran before, and he was obviously old. He was lean,
tall, and angular. His face was thin and withered, capped by a little halo of
scrag-gly white hair; his hands were gnarled with age, and his clothes had the
timeless appearance that only long wear can achieve.
But
his body, though slim, was straight and erect; his eyes were bright; and his
expression seemed to say to me, I know I look
old and threadbare, but the outside of a man is not so important, is it?
"Professor Lee?"
I asked.
He
grinned and extended his hand. "And you must be Alan Bakerman. Jeff's
message said he was sending an interesting friend, but he didn't tell me you'd have
golden skin and amber eyes."
The
way he said that, it sounded like an accomplishment.
"Come,"
he said, pointing to the slidewalk, "I have a groundcar waiting for
us."
The
slidewalk carried us to an outer area where cars were parked under a plastic bubble-roof.
We got into a little two-seater. Dr. Lee punched a button and the car guided
itself through the parking area and outside onto a lone road leading up and
around the mountainside.
As
we climbed up the road, a vast, bleak, frozen plain unfolded below us,
stretching to the horizon where another clump of mountains thrust jagged white
peaks into the dark sky. Stars were twinkling in that sky, and the snowy plain
below us gleamed a pale, frosty blue-white.
"What time of night is
it here?" I asked.
Dr.
Lee chuckled. "It's nearly high noon, my friend. I'm afraid you're a good
bit farther from Sol than you realize."
Just
then the car rounded a curve and before us was the planet Titan orbited
around—Saturn: a huge globe of gaudy red, yellow, and orange stripes circled
about its middle by brilliant knife-edged rings. It hung low in the sky and
seemed almost close enough to touch.
"It's
always a pleasure to watch a person's face when he first sees Saturn," Dr.
Lee said. "I often wish I had never seen it before, so that I could
experience the thrill you must feel right now."
"It... it's magnificent," I stuttered.
"I've never seen anything like this."
"It's
a little like having a circus overhead," Dr. Lee said.
We
drove on in silence for quite awhile as I watched the giant planet. Soon I
noticed the shadows of other moons on Saturn's brilliant surface.
"How many moons does
Saturn have?" I asked.
"Nine
major ones," he replied, "and from time-to-time it captures a stray
planetoid or meteor temporarily; usually they are pulled into the planet or
its rings pretty quickly."
Dr.
Lee went on to explain that Titan was the largest natural satellite in the
Solar system and that at its distance from Saturn the planet looked three
times larger than a full moon on Earth.
"Unfortunately,
that doesn't mean much to me. . .." I
said.
"Of course," he
said, frowning. "You've never been to Earth. I apologize for boring you
with meaningless chatter."
"Not at all," I said. "I will
be on Earth in a week, and I can compare the night sky there with this."
"A bit drab," Dr. Lee said. "I imagine so," I answered.
Dr.
Lee looked out at the landscape. "We will be coming to our destination
soon."
The
road was slanting sharply downhill now, and I could see that it ran out into
another plain. But this plain was a tumbled, broken mass of jagged, shattered
rocks, with patches of ice and snow everywhere. Far off on the horizon, in the
direction the road was running, I could see the spires and domes of buildings.
"Is that the
school?" I asked, pointing.
"Where?"
he asked, squinting in the direction I indicated. "I'm afraid my eyes
aren't as good as yours. But I know what you see. No, it's not the school. . .
it's the ruins."
"Ruins?"
"Yes. . . the ruins of
the base of the Others."
I was surprised, and must
have shown it.
"Didn't
Jeff tell you about it? Well, no matter, I'll show you through them
tomorrow."
The
school buildings — when we arrived there — turned out to be much less
impressive than the ruins I had glimpsed from the car. The school consisted of
a small clump of plastic bubble-domes huddled together in the middle of that
barren, broken plain.
We
drove into one of the domes and left the car. I was surprised at the sudden
increase in weight I sensed as we entered the dome. Dr. Lee explained that
since
Titan
was less than half the size of Earth, a special type of energy screen was used
at all the human settlements to keep up an artificial gravity field equal to
Earth's.
"We
don't want Terrans to spend any great length of time in a different gravity
field. When they go back to Earth they have to learn how to walk all over
again," he explained.
We
walked over to a door that opened on a lift-chute. Only then did I realize that
the school was almost entirely underground.
We
spent the rest of that day looking over the school. It was unusual in many
ways. It had no formal name, it was known simply as Dr. Lee's school. There
were less than a hundred students; the faculty numbered about thirty.
"Most
of them do little actual teaching," Dr. Lee explained. "They are
former students who wanted to stay on to continue their studies. ... I somehow don't have the heart to
refuse them."
"But how do you feed
them?" I asked.
For
an answer, he took me to the hydroponics area where most of the school's food
was grown.
"Once
the chemical tanks were built and the sun lamps installed, the hydroponics
became almost self-sustaining. It takes very little money now to grow a completely
balanced diet."
It
turned out that there was no formal tuition charge for the students, either.
"They
pay what they can," Dr. Lee said, shrugging. "I have never found it
difficult to raise money. Most of the students' families pay much more than it
costs to teach them . . . but the surplus money is useful to help students who couldn't otherwise pay
their transportation here."
I
had to smile at him. "And what subjects do you teach here?"
"Subjects?" He
blinked.
"Subjects,"
I repeated. "Physics, chemistry, history, mathematics. . . ."
He
shook his head vehemently. "You don't understand. We don't teach any
subject . . . not as such. That's the trouble with education . . . too many
watertight compartments. We try to teach our students how to think . . . how
to use their brains and imagination. Individual subjects can always be learned
by a man who knows how to learn. We teach them to think, and the other subjects
arise by themselves . . . when a student becomes interested in a particular
subject, he studies it for himself, or with a teacher who is also particularly
interested in that phase of knowledge."
He
pointed a bony finger at me. "Remember this, young man: facts can always
be learned and recognized; concepts and ideas are what must be taught."
We
ended the day with a sparse meal of the hydro-ponically-grown vegetables, and a
brief tour of the school's gymnasium. Then Dr. Lee escorted me to one of the
extra students' rooms, a bare little cell but comfortable enough.
The
next morning after breakfast Dr. Lee summoned me to his office. As I expected,
it was a small cubbyhole, his desk was littered with papers and worn smooth
from years of use. He was dressed in a loose-fitting one-piece coverall.
We
began talking, and I soon found him curious about the origin of my people.
After I tried answering
his questions as fully as I could, I realized how little I knew.
"Quite
enlightening," Dr. Lee murmured at last. "From what you've told me,
it would seem that the Rh'khour'mnin peoples are not descended from Earth at
all . . . but developed entirely independently in their own star cluster."
I
nodded agreement. "As far as I know, our first contact with any race from
outside the cluster was with the Saurians . . . and the Masters, of
course."
"But
more important," he mused, half to himself, "is that you can trace
your people's history well past the time of the First Terran Empire's
destruction by the Others."
"What does this
mean?" I wondered aloud.
"Mean?
Why, it means several things. First, that the Others either didn't know or
didn't care that there were humans elsewhere in the galaxy. Second, that the
present Terran Confederation is nearing the limits of the old empire. Finally,
and most important, it means that human life can—and probably has—originated in
several places in the galaxy, not merely on Earth."
He
rose from his desk and opened the door to the hallway outside, beckoning me to
follow. For a man of his obvious age, he was remarkably agile.
As
we walked down the corridor, Dr. Lee continued his line of reasoning:
"We've
known of only three races — humans, the Saurians, and the Hydra, squidlike
creatures who live on high-gravity, low-density planets like Saturn. They also
are members of the Masters' empire."
We
reached the lift-chute and were carried up to the dome where the groundcars
were parked.
"So far, the only humans we've met were
descendants of the colonies of the First Terran Empire . . . stragglers that
were overlooked by the Others for one reason or another. But you've given
strong weight to the idea that human life can develop independently on any
Earth-like planet."
"Well,"
I said, as we entered a groundcar, "I suppose it could. Similar
environmental conditions should produce similar results."
"Theoretically,"
Dr. Lee said. "But you're the first proof that such a thing has actually
happened."
"Where are we going
now?" I asked.
"Eh?
Why, you said you wanted to see the ruins, didn't you?"
He
punched a button on the car's control panel and we shot forward.
Actually,
the buildings were far from being the crumbled, weathered debris I had
expected.
"Whoever
built this," Dr. Lee said as we approached, "built it to last."
We
drove completely around the group of buildings, which stood gloomily wrapped in
the double shadows of Saturn and the distant sun. Beyond the buildings, the
barren plain stretched out to the horizon where stars twinkled coldly. One of
these points of light, I knew, was Mars; another, Earth.
There
were six buildings, five square, squat, featureless structures ringed around a
sweeping pentagon-shaped tower which soared upward to a series of domes
surmounted by antennalike spires—the domes and spires I had seen from the road
the day before. This central building was connected to the others by a series
of arched passageways.
Dr. Lee stopped the car, and we squirmed into
space-suits before getting out. Besides having an ammonia and methane
atmosphere, Titan's temperature was low enough to turn oxygen into a liquid. So
we needed both warmth and breathable air for our tour of the ruins.
After
checking-out the suits and their radios, we left the car and headed for the
nearest of the buildings.
As
we came up to the building, a low, wide doorway slid open automatically, and
we ducked through it.
"Photoelectric control." Dr. Lee's
voice sounded slightly strange in my helmet's earphones. "Odd-shaped
door," I said.
"It
was built for self-propelled vehicles, not humans," he answered as the
building's lights turned themselves on.
There
was only one room in the building, and it was crammed with weird-looking
machines. They seemed to be generators of some sort, but I had never seen
anything like them before; nor do I expect to ever see their like again. Giant
coils, banks of tubes, incomprehensible masses of equipment—all laced with
broad catwalks that twined between the machines, crawled around and over some
of them, and hung suspended from the low ceiling.
As
I looked over the sprawling machinery, I slowly realized why this place was
considered ruins. Most of the massive consoles were cracked open; tubes and
other delicate pieces of equipment lay smashed and strewn all over.
I
turned to Dr. Lee, unrecognizable in his bulky suit, standing at the other side
of the catwalk.
"It took the best scientists Earth had
more than fifty years to discover what this machinery was used for, and how it
worked," he said. "Once we were certain, the Star Watch dismantled
the whole installation. Now only the lights and the doors still work."
"What is this
place?" I asked.
I
could hear his breathing in my earphones as he walked over to me.
"This
is the wave-generating equipment the Others used to cause the Ice Ages on
Earth," he replied. "This is the machinery that was supposed to seal
man's doom."
We
went through the room and along the low-slung passageway to the central tower.
There Dr. Lee showed me the nuclear fusion reactor that still powered the
machines that had not been dismantled, the rows of self-propelled maintenance
and repair vehicles, and the transmitter that once had beamed
Solar-interference waves to Earth.
"With
all this equipment to study," I said, "surely you have been able to
deduce something about what type of creatures the Others were."
"How
could we?" he asked, attempting a shrug inside his spacesuit. "Look
around again."
It
took me a few moments to understand what he meant. Then slowly it became clear.
On all the equipment we had seen, from the outer door to the repair
vehicles—there had not been a switch, a dial, a lever anywhere!
"It
is all designed as an automatic, self-sufficient installation," Dr. Lee
affirmed. "These machines were serviced and repaired by other machines.
The whole installation worked by itself for almost a million years."
I walked back to the groundcar with Dr. Lee
in stunned silence. All my life I had been told of the magnificence of the
Masters, of their perfect science and technology. But this was more staggering
than all the words I had ever heard. A giant machine running continuously for a
million years, repairing itself without a living hand touching it . . . and
silently, efficiently, disrupting the climate patterns of an entire planet.
Once
inside the car, I automatically pulled off the cumbersome spacesuit.
"Jeff
used to spend much of his spare time brooding here when he studied with
me," Dr. Lee said as he started the car. "He seemed drawn to these
ruins . . . as though he was looking for something in them."
"He
was," I said. "And now he has found what he was seeking."
The next morning I left for
Mars.
Dr.
Lee drove me to the spaceport, and we talked about the war on the way. I was
slightly surprised at his interest, because up until these last few minutes he
had not even hinted that he knew the war existed.
He
was curious about the Star Watch's plans for defending the Confederation, and I told him the general scheme of Heath Knowland's proposal to build a network
of fortresses along the Confederation's frontiers.
"And
Jeff is going to present this plan to the Council next week?" he asked.
"Heath
will make the presentation himself, via a tri-di broadcast from the
fleet," I said. "Jeff will follow up with any
additional information and persuasion he can provide."
Dr. Lee was silent for a while. But as we
approached the spaceport he said:
"I'm
not qualified to judge Jeff's father's plan on its military merits. But tell
Jeff that walls built to keep invaders outside also keep the defenders inside.
He'll understand what I mean."
Moments
later, we were shaking hands at almost the precise spot where we had first met.
I had known him for less than two days, but Dr. Lee showed me more warmth and
friendship in that short time than any Terran I had known—except Jeff.
Mars was, at the same time, the best and the
worst place I visited.
Of
all the planets of Sol, to me Mars is the most beautiful. The moment I stepped
off the ship at the spaceport, I realized how long it had been since I had been
wholly comfortable with my environment.
I
had been living on Terran ships, with Terran gravitational fields and
temperature levels for so long that I had forgotten what it felt like to bask
in the free, cool breezes of a friendly planet.
Now
suddenly I could walk easily, with no strain, and I could enjoy a morning that
was neither the frigid darkness of Titan nor the warm humidity of a Terran
air-conditioning system.
I
walked leisurely from the ship across the vast landing disc of the main
Martian spaceport. It was a busy port, I noticed, with ships landing and rising
on their soundless antigrav fields every few seconds.
Beyond
the port buildings I could see a complex sprawl of bigger structures, all
flying the blue banner of the Terran Confederation and the black pennant of the
Star Watch.
The
port's administration building, of course, was under Terran temperature and
gravity conditions. I checked with one of the many civilian clerks, and she
nodded to a Star Watch noncommissioned officer who had been sitting nearby.
"Officer
Bakerman, sir? I'm Sergeant McDonnell. I'll transport you to Star Watch headquarters,
sir."
He
took my one bag of belongings in a big hand, and headed for a door. He was a
typically big Terran, with an athletic physique, close-cropped blond hair, and
a face that betrayed his youth. I went with him through the port's main waiting
room—a bustling theater-sized enclosure where Star Watch uniforms predominated
in the crowd—down a corridor, out a door, and into a bubble-topped aircar.
We
took off vertically, hovered above the spaceport for a moment, then darted out
past the Star Watch buildings and toward the horizon, following an ancient
canal.
"I
thought we were going to headquarters," I said as we passed the Star Watch
buildings.
"We
are, sir," the sergeant answered. "The installation we just passed
is the Star Watch Fleet Command Center. We're going to the Intelligence Center
. . . that's where the Chief Coordinator and his staff are located."
"Oh. Am I to see the Chief
Coordinator?" He grinned. "I'm only a sergeant, sir. They wouldn't
tell me."
Evidently
we had a distance to travel. I settled back to enjoy the trip.
I cannot remember much about my homeworld, but it must have been a lot
like Mars. As we flew along the canal, half-filled with calm, cool water, I could sec belts of soft green vegetation stretching on either side of it,
gradually fading into the pinkish dust of the desert near the horizon. Above
us, the sky was a majestic blue, deepening nearly to black at the zenith.
We
passed several little knots of buildings on the way, most of them lying close
by the canal. They were gleaming white, hugging the contour of the landscape.
There were people outside in the sun, children playing, and several times I saw aircars parked near the houses. The sergeant told me that almost all
of these homes belonged to the civilian personnel who worked for the Star
Watch.
"The
Star Watch is Mars' biggest industry," he said. "Practically
everybody on the planet is connected with the Prime Base in one way or
another."
He
went on to explain that it was a good joke, too, since Mars was the war god of
an ancient Earth culture, and the Star Watch is the military service of the
Terran Confederation.
But
if Mars were named for a war god, it was named long before the Terrans had set
foot 071 the planet. A more tranquil, lovely place I have never seen ... although the sergeant complained about
the thinness of its manufactured air and the cold weather.
Abruptly
rising from the gentle landscape was the Star Watch Intelligence Center.
Blocklike gray buildings thrust their masses skyward in the middle of a warm
pink desert. As we flew nearer, I could see that the stark buildings were
probably temporary structures, built since the war had grown to serious proportions. Almost completely overshadowed by them
was a small cluster of neat, graceful, thoughtfully-designed buildings —
evidently the original center, which had been badly overgrown.
We
landed, and tire sergeant turned me over to a bright-looking young captain, the
Chief Coordinator s adjutant.
This
was the beginning of an ordeal I shall never forget.
I
gave Heath Knowland's reports to the captain, who then bustled me off to a
roomful of other officers. Without preliminaries, they began to question me
about the status of the fleet and the strength of the enemy we had faced at
Scandia. It soon became apparent that what they were really trying to learn
was whether or not I could be trusted to tell the truth.
After
a few hours of questions, one of the older men pushed a button on his desk. A
corporal appeared in the doorway.
"Thank
you very much for your cooperation, Mr. Bakerman," the officer said.
"Corporal, will you please take this alien to E.T.D.?"
Alien.
E.T.D.
turned out to be the Extraterrestrial Department of Central Intelligence, I
learned as we went through a marked doorway. There the routine was at first the
same, a windowless room full of Star Watch officers asking me questions. But
these questions were about me and my background.
"Have
you ever been face to face with one of the Masters?"
"How
many Saurian troops do you estimate to be stationed in the Pleiades
cluster?"
"How many
years were you trained by
the Saurians?"
"How does your age
and maturity
compare with a Terrans?"
"What is
the physiological
make-up of the Sauri-
ans?"
"You're positive that
you know
nothing at all about the Masters
except what you've told us?"
It went on
that way all through the
day. We stopped for meals, but
even then the same bright,
young, nameless faces were clustered
around me, either asking the
same questions or thinking
up new
ones. Finally I was shown to
a room—a
very comfortable room—and left alone for the night.
But while I
slept, some of those eager
investigators must have been
going over tape recordings of my answers. Immediately
after breakfast, which I had
in my
room, I was summoned
to another
questioning in another hot little
room crammed with suspicious Terrans. This time they were
interested in certain specific points
we had covered the day before;
they now wanted more details, more precise information . . . they
wanted all the knowledge my brain
held.
In the middle
of the
morning, as several of them
were asking about my
training by the Saurians, I
saw two of the officers whispering
in a
far corner
of the
room. I do not
pretend to be a mind
reader, but sometimes—especially
when under emotional strain—I can
detect the general subject
of a
conversation without hearing the actual spoken
words. This is simply part
of the mental development that every
human is capable of but the
Terrans had not yet learned.
I rose
from my chair and waved
my questioners
into silence.
"Those two gentlemen are discussing the
advisability of using drugs to help probe my subconscious mind for information
that will be helpful to you," I said. The two officers in the corner
turned white.
"That
is not necessary," I went
on, "nor is it advisable. My body chemistry is very similar to yours, but
I am not willing to risk taking narcotics or stimulants . . . none of us knows
what effect they might have on me, or whether it will cause permanent damage to
my nervous system."
One
of the older men sitting near me squirmed slightly in his seat and coughed. It
was easy to interpret his unspoken thought.
"You
are thinking that my wishes in this do not matter," I said to him.
He
nearly jumped out of his chair. "No, not at all . . . I merely . . . that
is. . . ."
"I
can assure you that I will not voluntarily take any drugs," I told them.
"Moreover, it is entirely unnecessary. My training, which you arc so
interested in, included developing total recall ... I can remember anything and everything that has happened to
me since I began my training under the Saurians."
Their
reaction to my claim was wordless, but obvious just the same.
"You
do not believe me. Well, let me show you a little of what I have learned from
the Saurians as far as mental development is concerned. Do I have your
permission?"
They
all looked around at one another, then turned to the senior officer there. He
was wearing the diamond insignia of a commander.
"All
right," he said. "Co ahead and show us your mental abilities."
"Very
well," I said. "Your name is Robert Armstrong . . . age fifty-eight
. . . you were bom on Earth, North America, I believe . .. right now you are slightly amused and still a little skeptical
. . . but there is a matter concerning your dreams of becoming the Star Watch's
chief psych tech which you are trying very hard not to think about. Shall I go
farther?"
He
stiffened in his chair. "That's quite far enough, thank you."
"And
you," I said, turning to a grinning youngster, "are Lester Berger ... up to now you have been rather bored
with your morning's work because you have been thinking about a date you have
tonight with a certain nurse working in this building. But you rather enjoyed
watching your commander's discomfort a moment ago."
"I wouldn't say
that!" he flustered.
"Very
well, Mr. Bakerman," Commander Armstrong said. "You've proved your
point. Now show us how good you are at total recall... I want to know everything you know . . . and I mean
everything."
"Wait
a minute, chief," one of the younger officers said. "How do wc know
the lizards haven't planted mental blocks in his brain? Maybe he won't be able
to tell us everything."
"They
have placed one block," I admitted. "But only one. I cannot remember
anything about my family, and my recollections of my homework! are extremely
hazy. But I trust that will not interfere with your plans."
"They blocked out your
memories of your family?"
"To
make a more efficient servant of the Masters out of me," I said. "But
otherwise the Saurians left my mind free to develop as fully as possible."
"We'll see,"
Commander Armstrong said.
The
technique for total recall is a form of self-hypnosis. Fortunately, the brain
does not store all the information it receives in the conscious mind. It would
be far too confusing and too big a burden . . . like trying to carry all the
books you have read wherever you go. But nothing is forgotten. The subconscious
mind is the brain's reference library; it takes special skill, though, to open
up that store of information at will. Terrans cannot do it, except with the
help of a trained psychiatrist. No human can do it unless he is willing to go
through a long, arduous mental ordeal.
I
cannot tell how many hours I spent draining my mind of every particle of
information it held. I only know that I awoke in my room, drenched in perspiration,
too weak and physically sick to eat the meal that was waiting for me on a tray
beside my bunk. I forced myself back to sleep, and must have
slept the clock around before I arose. There was another meal waiting for me,
which I ate appreciatively.
As
I was finishing it, a soft buzzer sounded somewhere in the room. I looked
around and saw a green light flashing next to a blank viewscreen.
I
walked five steps to the screen, still a little wobbly, and turned it on. The
face that appeared was that of another young Star Watch officer, but instead of
the bright-eyed eagerness of the others I had met, this person was smiling
pleasantly.
"Mr. Bakerman? I'm Marshall Jordan, a
friend of Jeff's."
I answered with a
noncommittal monosyllable.
"I
called earlier, but I guess you were asleep. I wonder if I could see you
sometime today?"
"Certainly,"
I said. "But you'd better come at once. I'm not sure when the other
Intelligence officers will want to talk with me again."
His
smile broadened. "I'm not an Intelligence man, and they won't bother you
any more. But I'll come right down. I'm in the building now, so I should probably
be knocking on your door in five minutes or so. All right?"
"Fine," I said.
Four
minutes and fifty-some seconds later, Marshall Jordan entered my room. He was
slightly taller than Jeff, I judged, and on the slender side. His face, though,
was roundish; he had warm brown eyes and sandy hair that he had allowed to grow
well past the Star Watch regulation length. His uniform insignia was that of a
junior staff officer.
"So
the high-I. Q. boys put you through the wringer," he said after we had
gone through the meaningless formalities that begin most conversations.
"Jeff was afraid of that when you didn't show up at home, and he sent me
up here to shake you loose from the brain-pickers."
I
was surprised by his candor. "Well, they are conscientious officers, I
imagine, and I'm the first person they have met who has lived under the
Masters. . . ."
"It
wasn't conscientious of them to grill you for two straight days like that,"
he said. "There's no excuse for that kind of zeal. And I had to practically raise the threat of armed
insurrection before they'd agree to let you go. They were all set to run you
into the ground again as soon as you recovered from the session you had two
days ago."
"Two days ago?" I
repeated.
"Sure.
You've been in your bunk for nearly forty-eight hours. But that's all over now.
I told the local intelligencia that you had been summoned by the Ter-ran
Confederation Council to appear at then meeting this week, and if they didn't
let you go immediately they'd have to answer to the Council. And you know,
that's almost
the truth!"
I had to laugh at him.
Within
a few hours Marsh—as he insisted on being called—had gathered up my belongings
and escorted me to his private ship, waiting on a small landing disc just
outside the building.
"This
is not a Star Watch ship," I commented as we entered it.
"Nope, it's mine. My uncle owns a few
shipyards back on Earth . . . he's the scion of an old Yankee family of
shipbuilders and navigators. I designed this little job myself. Seats four . .
. good for short hops."
In
his own offhand manner, Marsh was being modest about his ship. It was a
beautifully-designed vehicle, both in appearance and performance. Its interior
was as plush as any pleasure ship in the Terran Confederation, yet this sleek
little runabout zipped us from Mars to a touchdown at a crowded port on Earth
in less than two hours.
"We
could have gone faster, but it's against the law," Marsh said, somewhat
glumly.
Marsh landed at a commercial port in what he
called Western Europe. From there we flew by air car to the home of Jeff's
mother, on the outskirts of the Riviera megalopolis.
It
was twilight as we approached the giant city. From our altitude of several thousand
feet, all I could see was an ocean of twinkling lights, spreading on and on to
the horizon.
"Jeff's
home is in the foothills of the Alps, on the edge of the city," Marsh
said, although his information was meaningless to me then. It was only later
that I realized that the city extended from the Pyrenees Mountains on the
border of what was once called Spain, all along the Mediterranean coast to the
Alps and the Italian peninsula.
We
spent nearly an hour flying along the edge of the lights, until finally there
was a broad patch of darkness broken only by a tiny glow far off in the
distance.
The
glow turned out to be a brilliantly-lighted villa standing alone on a hilltop.
It was a huge mansion, and as we came in to land on its roof, I could see hundreds
of air- and groundcars parked nearby.
As
we left the aircar we could hear music coming from below us.
"Jeff's mother is throwing a party for
some of the Council members tonight," Marsh told me.
Robots
towed our car off the landing area while we walked across the roof to the
doorway that led downstairs. It was a warm night, with little breeze. I craned
my neck for a glimpse of Earth's moon, but the lights on the roof blotted out
most of the evening sky.
We
went down three flights of moving stairs to a large ballroom that was filled
with people and music.
Smiling,
beautiful women in flowing jeweled gowns, men in brightly-colored evening
dress, long tables of refreshments, musicians playing, couples dancing,
laughter, music, a thousand conversations at once . . . it was both exciting
and confusing to me.
"Wow,
more than half of Terra must be here," Marsh said.
Then
in the midst of the reds and plaids and golds and whites of the party guests I
saw a slim young man dressed in the black and silver of the Star Watch: Jeff.
And almost as soon as I spotted him, he turned and recognized us.
He
strode through the crowd to us. "Alan, how are you? I'm sorry about what
happened on Mars. . . ."
"It was nothing,"
I said. "I'm fine. You look well."
"Thanks.
I guess I should, after sitting home doing nothing for a week."
Actually,
Jeff looked about the same as when I had last seen him; more rested, certainly,
but his face was still thin and angular, his body whipcord lean.
"You
should have come with me," Marsh said to Jeff, "and seen the old Alma
Mater. Things have changed a lot since we've been there."
"Alma Mater?" I
asked.
"He
means the Star Watch Academy," Jeff said. "Marsh and I met there and
spent two miserable years together."
"We
learned to be officers and gentlemen," Marsh added. "And don't fall
for that miserable stuff. Our boy Jeff singlehandedly fractured every record in
the Academy's book while he was there . . . top scholastic average, captain
of his class, outstanding athlete . . . your records are still untouched, I
found out."
"Is that why it took you two days to
pick up Alan and bring him here?" Jeff asked, grinning.
Marsh
feigned wounded pride. "What a nasty thing to say! I practically had to
blow up half the Intelligence Center to make them let go of Alan. I spent at
least thirty-six hours cooling my heels in various offices. I just did a lot of
phoning while I waited, that's all. Come to think of it, they probably
surrendered Alan to me just to unsnarl their communications system."
We
all laughed. Jeff said, "That's the way to do it. Make the biggest possible
nuisance of yourself, and you'll get what you want . . . providing you promise
to leave."
"By
the way," Marsh said, "I learned something very interesting while
banging around Prime Base. . . . They've definitely proved that a ship in
superlight overdrive is not physically in this universe."
Jeff was instantly curious.
"Proved it? How?"
"Simple.
Commander Hickey and his oscilloscope-peekers rigged a robot ship to fly a
superlight course right through the middle of the sun . . . the ship went
through on course exactly, without even singeing the paint on her name plate.
Hickey and two volunteers later made the same run themselves, just to make certain
that the instruments were telling the truth. They were. The ship was literally
out of this world. Hickey has called the nonuniverse subspace."
"Odd no one thought of
it before," Jeff mused.
"Too
obvious," Marsh answered, "The obvious needs a man of genius to
discover it. Besides, there are some tricky technical details to work out—the
star's radiation and gravitational spectra leak into subspace a bit, for
instance.
"I thought about flying through a star
when we were at the Academy, but I was certain that somebody would punch a hole
in my idea because it was so simple. . .
Jeff
winked at me. "Listen to him, Alan. The self-styled man of genius."
"No, I didn't mean it
that way. . . ."
"He's
not happy that somebody finally proved a scientific problem," Jeff went
on. "He's only jealous for not having thought of it himself ... so he invents an elaborate excuse for
overlooking the obvious. . . ."
Marsh
made the sourest face he could contort his features into and answered only,
"Aaahhh. . . ."
"All
right, all right," Jeff said, laughing. "I'm only kidding. Alan, in
fairness to our friend here .. . he's
the best navigator the Star Watch Academy ever produced, and he got better
grades than I did in mathematics." He turned to Marsh. "How's that.
Okay?"
Marsh
smiled benignly. "In all honesty, I must admit you're right."
Just
then Terry steered his way through the crowded room, his flaming red hair
towering above everyone else, and joined us. We stood and talked as though we
had been friends since birth, the four of us, although not even Jeff and
Marshall had known each other for more than three years, and Terry and I had
met them—and each other—less than a month ago.
We
did not realize it then, but this first meeting of the four of us together was
the beginning of a partnership that would eventually take us halfway across the
galaxy and end in victory, fame, and death.
The
evening wore on and we helped ourselves to food and refreshments as we talked.
In time Marsh and Terry drifted back to the crowd. Then the warmth of the room
got to be a bit too oppressive for me and I asked Jeff to excuse me while I got
some fresh air.
"Sure,"
he said. "There's a terrace outside ..
. I'll go with you."
"No,
I'm all right. I only want a little air. Stay with the party and enjoy
yourself."
"I
really don't know many of the people here," Jeff said. "They're
mostly my mother's friends. I've been away from Earth for most of seven years,
first with Dr. Lee, then the Academy, and finally Star Watch service."
But
I would not let him join me. "You're home. Dance and enjoy the
party."
He shrugged. "If you
insist, Alan."
I
walked out onto the terrace. It was cooler there, and a soft breeze had sprung
up. The terrace was lighted only by the glow from inside the villa coming
through the sweeping windows and open doors. I searched the heavens for a
glimpse of the group of stars the Terrans call the Pleiades, but could not find
them. Behind me I could hear laughter and music; above me were the unfamiliar
stars of a world that was alien to me; below me, as I looked out from the
terrace, was a sea of twinkling lights, brighter and more numerous than the
stars, stretching out to the distant horizon.
"You
must be very lonely," a woman's soft voice behind me said.
I
turned. She was tall and dark-haired, dressed in a shimmering green gown.
"I
am Renata, Jeff's mother," she said. "You're Alan Bakerman, aren't
you?"
"Yes," I replied. "I... I had no idea that Jeff's mother would
be so young, and so beautiful."
She
laughed warmly. "Every woman likes to be told she's beautiful; but telling
her that she's young is indeed flattery."
"Not at all," I
assured her.
"I'm
sorry Jeff didn't get the chance to introduce us," she said, "but
I've been kept busy by my other guests until now. I saw you come out here on
the terrace and decided to introduce myself."
"I'm very pleased that
you did," I said.
Except
that she looked too young, I might have guessed that she was Jeff's mother; she
had the same facial mold of fine, delicate bone structure, the same coloring,
the same intensity of expression.
"You
have been with my husband for the past year?" she asked rhetorically.
"Yes," I said.
"He is well."
"Truly?"
I
could see in her eyes that she wanted no evasions. "His work is difficult... and he feels the burden of it. But his
health is fine, and his men revere him."
She
smiled, but there was sadness in it. "I know how difficult his work is,
and how long he has been at it, and how far from home it keeps him. That's the
reason for this party tonight, really. I can't join him in his fleet on the
frontier ... but I can do everything
possible here to see that the Council decides in his favor, and gives him the
ships and men he needs."
"It must be a very
hard and lonely time for you."
"Yes.
But in a way, I'm the fortunate one," she said. "At least I'm home,
with the friends and surroundings I've known all my life. With Heath and Jeff
it's different. . . their home is a battlefield, and their constant companion
is death."
"Yet they must fight
this war," I said.
"I
know," she replied,
"but I also realize what price the war is taking
from them. Heath bears the responsibility . . . and the Council sits safely at
home, expecting him to keep the invaders away, even though he is practically
alone against them."
"Surely the Council
will send more help,"
"When?
And how much? And what help can they send that will ease the burden of
responsibility he feels? My husband was leader of the Terran patrol that first
contacted the Saurians, almost twenty years ago. Do you know how he is haunted
by the aftermath of that contact...
the killing, the terror, the lighting that has gradually grown until we find
ourselves at war with an enemy vastly more powerful than we are?"
"But
Heath must realize that he is not to blame, merely because his patrol was the
first. .. ."
"He
realizes the truth of it," she said, "but he feels the burden just
the same. Knowledge and emotion are two separate forces in the human
mind."
I
said nothing, but watched her as she stood by the railing of the terrace, the
cool breeze playing with her hair, the lights from the party inside reflecting
in her dark eyes.
"And
Jeff," she said at last. "What about my son? Ever since he was old
enough to understand, his father has been fighting an unbeatable enemy... an enemy that always wins or melts away
before you can strike back.
"I wanted Jeff to be an important leader in the
Confederation.
I sent him to the finest schools in the Solar system. I pleaded with him to go
into government service; he could be the youngest member ever elected to the
Council, someday. But I'm just a woman, and who listens to a mother's advice
when a war is being fought?"
I
tried to work away from the subject. "Jeff is a fine officer, and he will
attain a high place in the Star Watch."
"Perhaps,"
she answered. "But he could become one of the Confederation's most
influential leaders if he would resign from the Star Watch and enter government
service here on Earth. A man of his intelligence and training should be
working toward a place of leadership here; there are thousands of officers in
the Star Watch doing the same thing Jeff does."
"But does he want to
enter politics?" I asked.
She
shook her head. "No. But neither did he want to join the Star Watch. All
his life, Jeff has wanted only one thing: to explore the galaxy, to discover
new stars, new worlds...
"The map," I
murmured.
"I've
heard of his galaxy map," she said. "Yes, exploring the unknown is
his first love . .. filling in the
blank areas of his map is what he really wants to do. But the war has closed
that door to him. So he's followed his father's path. .. 7
She
glanced back at the house. "I...
I should really return to my other guests. I've unburdened my heart to you, Mr.
Bakerman ... I don't know why I
should have troubled you with my fears, except that I sensed that you were
lonely... as I am. Please forgive
me."
"I only hope that you found me a
sympathetic listener," I said.
"I never realized before that a person could be
lonely on his own homeworld, surrounded by friends...
We
started toward the doors, back to the party. "About your worries
concerning Jeff," I said. "I'm certain that if he uses the
abilities he has, he will become the important leader you want him to be,
regardless of where he is. There is potential greatness in him."
"I
know," she said, pausing before the doorway. "The way hasn't been
easy for Jeff. He's always been under pressure to excel in everything he
does—even his parents have been guilty of pushing him, I'm afraid. But there is greatness
in him."
She
reached out and touched my arm. "Alan, he needs a friend ... someone to stand by him wherever he
goes; someone he can talk to, and get advice from. Will you do this for him? He
likes you, I know. . . ."
"Jeff
has been my friend since the day we first met," I said, "and I hope
that I've been his."
As
we turned to enter the ballroom, Jeff came walking toward us.
"I've
been looking around to introduce you to each other," he said, "but I
guess you've beaten me to it."
As
we stood there, for an instant Jeff's eyes met his mother's gaze. It was only a
momentary thing, but for that instant I could see the wordless, undefinable
link between the mother and son. It was more than the physical resemblance,
more even than familial love for one another; it was a meeting of minds and
wills.
In
that brief glance Jeff told his mother that, although he would always be her
son, he was now a man and he must follow his own life in the way he felt best. And she said to him,
wordlessly, that she understood, even though she could not agree with him.
"I
must get back to my other guests," she said to us. "Mr. Bakerman,
thank you so much for being such a good listener. Jeff, take good care of your
friend."
He grinned. "Certainly, Mother."
She
rejoined the chatting couples nearby and was soon engulfed in the crowd. Jeff
turned to me and said, "I could use some fresh air myself, now."
We walked back on to the terrace.
"What was my mother talking about?"
Jeff asked.
"About
you, mostly," I said. "She was telling me about her hopes for your career."
Jeff
sat on the stone railing. "Some career choice: go into politics with my
mother's family or join the Star Watch with my father's family. I'll always be
known as so-and-so's nephew, or cousin, or son, no matter what I do."
"Is it that bad?" I asked.
"Well.
. he smiled. "No, I guess not quite that bad."
I
looked up at the stars again. "A while ago I was trying to find
Rh'khour'mnin—the Pleiades," I said.
"Oh,
sure ... they ought to be
visible." He hopped down from the railing and pointed. "See? There's
Orion . .. and that V-shaped group
belongs to Taurus, the Bull. .. now
just a little to the right.. . see
the cluster?"
Six
tiny, twinkling points of light. "Yes, I see them," I said.
I must have sounded terribly disappointed.
"I know," Jeff said, "they're a long way off. But we'll get to
them ... I promise you that."
The moon had risen and we watched it for
awhile. Jeff pointed out some of the dry-land "seas" and the craters
that were visible to the naked eye. We both strained for a glimpse of Selene
City, near the center of the moon's disc, but could not see its lights.
"It's
in the daylight side now," Jeff explained. "When it's over on the
night side you can see the lights pretty well."
"Dr.
Lee told me that Earth's sky was rather drab compared to Titan's," I said,
"but I think it's quite beautiful."
"Titan's
spectacular, all right, with Saturn hanging up there ... but home is where the heart is, and home always looks
best," Jeff said.
He
looked out at the stars again, then turned back to me. "You know, I've
been thinking about something you said a couple of weeks ago... the night I showed you the galaxy
map."
"Yes?" '
"You
said then that the Masters could absorb the Terran Confederation without firing
a shot, because their culture was so superior to ours. I didn't believe you
then."
"And now?"
"Well,
being home brings back memories that you never realized you had. All day long
I've been thinking of a vacation I took with my parents when I was very young.
.. about nine or ten, I guess.
"We
flew to New Guineau, an island in our major ocean," he went on. "I
remember it was a big event for me, because my father was seldom home. The
frontier was being raided pretty frequently by the aliens ... the Saurians, that is."
"Go on," I said.
"Well,
my father told me that this island was once an impassable jungle . .. the only people that lived on it were
headhunters. Then a big war was fought and the headhunters were suddenly
confronted with air-cars and steel tools and mo tor-driven groundcars . .. within three generations the headhunters
were just as civilized as anybody else on the planet. They cleaned out the
jungle pretty much and turned the island into a tourist resort."
I began to see what he was
driving at.
"I've been thinking .. . probably those headhunters, the first
ones at least, didn't want to have anything to do with the strangers that
showed them how uncivilized they were. They probably wanted to live the way
they had always lived. But one touch of modern civilization doomed their old
way of life. They were engulfed by the superior culture, whether they liked it
or not."
I
nodded. "Yes, that seems to be a rule of human behavior—and not only
human, but all intelligent creatures."
"So
whether we like it or not," Jeff said, frowning, "the Masters'
culture is going to absorb ours . . . just like a drop of ink in a glassful of
water will eventually spread until it colors all the water."
"But there's a
difference," I said.
"I
know... we want to absorb their
culture at our own rate, to digest it leisurely, use the parts of it that we
want and reject what doesn't suit us."
"But the Masters will
not pennit this."
"No, they'll try to
ram it all down our throats ... to
make us into the form they can best use for their own purposes .. . that's what we've got to fight
against."
"Hey,
there you are!" A voice from the doorway. We turned to see Marshall Jordan
rushing to us.
"They
just announced over the tri-di that the fleet is engaged in a terrific battle
out on the frontier," he said.
"Where?" we asked
simultaneously.
"No
exact location was given," Marsh said, "but it sounds to me as though
the Saurians are trying to clean up the frontier systems they bypassed when
they took Scandia. They'll need those systems if they expect to keep their
supply lines open."
"They said it was a
big battle?" Jeff asked.
"Full fleet
action."
Jeff
looked past Marshall's shoulder back into the ballroom where the party was
still in full swing.
"Look
at them," he muttered, "and all the other billions in the city and
all over this planet—I wonder how many of them realize we're at war?"
Chapter 4 The New
Leader
I |
he next
morning dawned cool and bright. I awoke
early and had breakfast with Marsh. Jeff, he told me, had already left for the
capital. We were driven to the heart of the city in a robot-groundcar, whipping
over miles of intricately cross-connected highways that cut right through the
mazes of buildings which made up the megalopolis.
"How fast are we going?" I asked as the city blurred
by-
"Oh,
about a hundred and fifty or so, Marsh said. "We've got plenty of time, so
there's no need to hurry."
I looked at him. "Thanks. This is fast
enough for me.
He
laughed. "Look, Alan, we could never run a city this size if we didn't
have rapid transportation. Centuries ago, it was thought that groundcars would
help to disperse the cities . . . spread them over the countryside. Well, the
cities spread out, all right. But they didn't thin out. There are more people
living in
78
every
cubic mile of this city than the total population of most colony planets."
I
tried to grasp the magnitude of the numbers he was hinting at. "That means
this city must have a population of more than ...
a hundred million?"
"Two-fifty,
last time I checked," Marsh shot back, "and probably a lot more by
now. And this is only one city . . . there are about twenty-five megalopolises
on Earth . . . Riviera here is a medimn-sized one. Eighty per cent of the planet's
population lives in 'em. The other twenty per cent lives in cities of various
sizes."
"Is there no rural
population?" I asked.
"Huh?"
"People living on
farms. Who grows your food?"
"Oh,
sure. We have farms . . . but why live out in the hills when you can have the
comforts of a city home? The farms run pretty much automatically, anyway."
Marsh
thought a moment, then resumed. "Besides, most of the planet's farm land
was exhausted years ago. We get our food from the sea, from hydroponics
centers—which can be in the cities just as easily as anywhere else—and the rest
of our food is imported from the colonies."
"Then most of your
planet is unused land," I said.
"Well,
depends on what you mean by 'unused.' Most of it can't be used for anything
much . . . exhausted farmland, abandoned mines, deserts, eroded badlands. But
the government has been reclaiming a lot of this and turning it into parks ... no sense trying to grow food on it,
since it's cheaper and healthier to use sea food or synthetics."
I looked through the car's window to the
endless rows of towers, the mammoth cubic buildings that held millions of
people in them, and the ribbonlike highways threading through everywhere.
"And
almost everyone on Earth lives in these buildings," I said, half to
myself.
"Yep.
Those who prefer the wide open spaces can ship out to the colonies. But you can
see why we need fast-moving cars of all types." Marsh patted the armrest
of his seat. "This baby is one of the best: fric-tionless antigrav
suspension, photon engine, and a guidance system that'll run either by itself
or hook into a city's network, like it is now."
I
heard him with only half my mind. I was still staring through the window,
watching the thousands of groundcars skimming over the highways, and the
equally numerous aircars flitting through the mazes of buildings in seemingly
random patterns. To think that these people could spend their whole lives in an
entirely artificial environment, without even the desire to see more of nature
than an occasional picnic in a well-tailored park—it was both fascinating and
appalling to me.
Soon
the car turned off the highway and entered a broad mall lined with gleaming
towers of marble, glass, and shining metal.
"The
government center," Marsh said cryptically. "There's the Capitol
building."
He
nodded toward a domed templelike structure at the far end of the mall. Crowds
of people were clustered about it, and from this distance we could see small
groups riding the moving stairways. Marsh led me around to one side and ushered
me into an automatic lift-tube.
"The stairways add dignity to the
building," he said as he punched a floor number, "but the tubes are a
lot faster."
We stepped off an instant later into a
hallway. Down at the end of it an armed guard stood by a double doorway. Marsh
showed some credentials to the guard, and the doors slid open.
We
went through into a small meeting chamber. The Council was already in session—fifteen
men of various ages sitting around a large table that had been made centuries
ago from a now-extinct tree: Marsh called it a Sequoia.
Another
guard inside the door showed us to seats along the wall. Across the room we
spotted Jeff and Terry sitting together, their Star Watch uniforms looking
strangely out-of-place in this setting.
"The
Council is just going through the routine business that starts every
meeting," Marsh whispered to me. "Nothing important has happened
yet."
The
chamber was smaller than I had
expected, but very ornate. The walls were marble, windowless, and lined with
stereoportraits of elderly men.
"Former
councilmen," Marsh told me quietly.
The
vaulted ceiling of the room bore a three-dimensional star map of the Terran
Confederation.
All
four walls of the oblong chamber were lined with chairs, but only a few
visitors were attending this session. I guessed
that the meeting was open only to those who had been summoned by the Council to
give firsthand reports pertaining to the subject under discussion.
Each councilman was seated in something that
looked more like a machine than a chair. The armrests, which were dotted with push buttons,
extended into small desks. Marsh told me that there were tape recorders, fax
scanners, and other equipment inside them. The councilmen could tap all the
information stored anywhere on the planet without leaving their seats.
But
if the room was stiff and ornate, the procedure of the meeting was not. The
councilmen wasted no time on speeches and flowery language. They spoke to each
other informally, casually, as they went about their business.
Soon
the Council President — a wiry, energetic-looking man of about fifty or
sixty—beckoned a Star Watch officer to him. The officer, who looked vaguely
familiar to me, took the empty chair at the President's left, opened a
voluminous notebook, and began reading aloud.
Marsh
leaned over and said to me, "The President's name is Josephs—good man;
Earth-born, cousin of Jeff's mother."
I nodded.
The
Star Watch officer was saying, "We ran his information
through our automatic computers, checking it against several proposed courses
of action against the enemy. Unfortunately, the computers still showed
insufficient data to give a definite probability curve. . . ."
Only
then did I recognize him: Commander Armstrong, the Intelligence officer who had
questioned me on Mars. He was reporting on what I had told him about the
Masters and the Saurians.
"We
are forced to conclude," he read on, "that our knowledge of the
enemy's military strength, dispositions, and intentions is still almost
zero." He flapped over his notebook and looked up at the councilmen.
"Thank
you, commander," President Josephs said. "You may leave if you
wish."
Marsh
whispered, "They've got an automatic tri-di tape of his testimony to play
back if they need it."
The
President said to his colleagues, "Now we'll hear what the Star Watch
proposes. Frontier Coordinator Knowland was supposed to make this report via
tri-di, but his fleet is still out of contact and presumably in battle. In his
place, his son, Junior Staff Officer Geoffrey Knowland, will give the
report."
Jeff
rose from his chair and walked to the vacated seat at the Council table.
Instead of sitting, he remained on his feet.
He
looked over the fifteen faces around the table, all watching him. "Before
going into the body of this report," he began, "I'd like to make a
preliminary comment.
"The
plan I'm going to detail was originated by my father. As you know, he has been
fighting the enemy for more than ten years. He is familiar with their tactics,
from small hit-and-run raids to the full-scale invasion of star systems like
Scandia. His plan has been examined and approved by the Star Watch Executive
Command.
"This
plan, then, represents the best thinking the Star Watch can bring to bear on
the vital problem facing us. No doubt you'll find the plan burdensome and
expensive. I can only say that, regardless of the cost, some plan of action
must be formulated and agreed upon immediately. Our time has already run out.
And this Council is the only body in the Confederation which can act to save us. The Star
Watch can't put its plan into effect without your approval."
Jeff
leaned over and punched a button on the chair beside him. The star map in the
ceiling lighted up. Reaching into a panel in the armrest-desk, he took out a
small pistol-shaped electronic pointer.
"The
main problem facing us," Jeff said, as the councilmen eased their chairs
down to see the ceiling comfortably, "is the tremendous distances between
our star systems. The enemy has been able to strike repeatedly on one side of
the Confederation," he pointed to a portion of the edge of the oval of
stars, "and almost simultaneously to hit an opposite side."
Jeff
replaced the pointer and snapped off die map. Their attention focused back on
him. "The conclusions we've drawn from this are twofold. First: our fleet
is greatly outnumbered . . . the enemy can overpower any sector of the
Confederation he chooses— he can invade two or more areas at the same time, and
each invasion fleet is bigger than our entire Star Watch frontier force.
"Second:
we cannot possibly defend the Confederation with only a mobile force like the
fleet. The enemy surrounds us, and is capable of choosing its point of attack.
While the fleet is fighting in one sector, the enemy attacks in another area.
By the time we get there, the battle is already lost."
Jeff
stopped speaking momentarily and looked the councilmen over once more.
"Gentlemen, this is the situation. We cannot continue to attempt our
present course of action, simply because we cannot afford further losses like Scandia.
The enemy can—at this
moment—strike any point in the Confederation. Even Earth."
That perked up their ears.
"What
are the Star Watch's recommendations?" the President asked.
Jeff
replied unhesitatingly, "That the Council initiate the largest,
best-manned and -equipped military force that the Confederation can support. We
must have a fleet that is numerically equal to the enemy's. All the frontier
star systems, and several systems deeper inside the Confederation must be
converted into fortress areas. . . ."
"For what
purpose?" a councilman asked.
"To
make deeper penetration into the Confederation impossibly expensive for the
enemy," Jeff said.
"It'll
be impossibly expensive, all right," the councilman retorted, "but
for which side?"
Marsh
turned to me. "Councilman Mason ...
a cunning little budget-watcher. Has his eye on the President's chair."
Mason
talked for several minutes about the cost of the Star Watch's proposal. He was
a short, pudgy, slightly stooped figure with a pasty, bland face. But his eyes
were crafty, and his arguments obviously carried weight with die councilmen.
"Councilman
Mason!" Jeff called out suddenly, interrupting him in midsentence.
"Can we afford to lose this war?"
Mason
was stopped cold, but another councilman was on his feet. "Who says we're
at war?" He was younger than the other councilmen; tall and lanky, with
sharp, chiseled features.
Before Jeff could reply, the councilman
added, "We've never received a declaration of war from the Masters ... or from the Saurians, either, for that
matter. Perhaps these attacks on us are the work of outlaws. Why don't we
contact these Masters, whoever they are, and see if we can negotiate with
them?"
The
President was shaking his head. "Mr. Kaiser, in the past ten years we have
made every possible attempt to contact and negotiate with our attackers. Every
attempt was ignored or rebuffed."
Councilman
Kaiser sat down. "He hasn't been told what to answer," Marsh
whispered.
"What?"
"Kaiser isn't speaking for
himself," Marsh said. "He's onlv a puppet for Mason."
"Really?"
Marsh
nodded. His expression was that of a conspirator with confidential information
which he had just entrusted to an uninformed colleague.
Jeff
was still on his feet and answering Kaiser. "In short," he was
saying, "I simply can't believe that a ten-year war of constantly mounting
intensity is the work of a band of pirates. We are at war, and if the loss of
Scandia isn't enough of a declaration for you, perhaps the loss of the Capella
system will be!"
"Whew!"
Marsh whistled. "Capella is Kaiser's home system."
"Even
if we could reach the Masters and talk with them," Jeff went on, "how
can we negotiate with them when it is so obvious that we can't even defend
ourselves?"
I
had something to add, so I rose from my chair. The President saw me.
"Mr.
Bakerman, do you wish to speak?" he asked. "Yes."
He
turned to Jeff. "If it's all right with you, Officer Knowland."
"Certainly,"
Jeff said, and sat down beside the President.
The
councilmen turned to me, and I said, "I only wish to point out that my
education and training under the Saurians was for the purpose of making me an
administrator of part of your Confederation after it was conquered. The Masters
have no intention of negotiating with you. Your only contact with them will be
through the Saurians, and they will speak to you only as conquerors. Nowhere in
their plans for this section of the galaxy do they anticipate peaceful
discussion."
For
several moments everyone was silent. I sat down.
Finally,
Councilman Mason turned back to the President and said, "With all due
consideration for Mr. Bakerman, and no intent whatsoever to slur him personally
... I wonder how much weight we can
give his testimony?"
Jeff was out of his seat like a shot.
"Mr. Mason. . .."
Mason
waved him silent "I mean no offense. But our own Intelligence people could
not evaluate his information ... for
all Mr. Bakerman himself knows, he might have been sent here by the Saurians
under unconscious command to subvert our efforts."
Councilman
Kaiser agreed. "After all, the Star Watch hasn't won a battle since he
joined the fleet.. .."
Jeff
leaned across the table toward them. "On several planets of this
Confederation your remarks would be sufficient grounds for a duel," he seethed. "You have not
only insulted this man, who is risking his life to aid us, but you have
impugned the judgment and ability of my father."
"Nothing of the
sort," Mason said.
"If
you think for one moment," Jeff went on, "that the fleet could have
won a battle in the past year against the odds it's faced, you don't belong on
this Council. . . ."
"Gentlemen,"
the President interceded. "This doesn't help us at all."
Another
councilman was on his feet. He was tall, but his stocky build disguised his
height.
"Councilman
Hines," Marsh informed me. "From Venus ... a solid citizen."
"There's
a consideration of the Star Watch plan that bothers me," Hines said.
"It's not the cost—we can always afford what it takes to keep ourselves
free. But there's a question of values here that we must think over very
carefully."
He
shifted his gaze directly to Jeff. "The Star Watch is asking that we train
every available man in the Confederation to fight the invaders. This may be
necessary. But do you realize what it means? Not only in terms of economics—but
what it means to the fundamental concepts of our democracy.
"I
take it that the Star Watch envisions a long, hard war. A war with no
foreseeable end, as I understand it. If we pour everything we have into
fighting the Masters, what happens to our government? Aren't we running the
risk of having the Star Watch become more powerful than any other agency in the
Confederation?
Even if we win such a war—and the cost will be fantastically high—such a huge
army will imperil the very freedoms we are trying to defend."
"Right!"
Mason snapped. "We can't have the Star Watch turning our Confederation
into a military dictatorship!"
They
argued for hours over that. Hines, who had brought up the point, only wanted to
make certain that control of the Star Watch was maintained by the government,
no matter how big an army was needed to fight the Masters. But Mason and Kaiser
hammered away at the obvious specter of a military dictatorship.
Servorobots
passed food and refreshments among us, but the verbal battle went on without
letup. Jeff clung to the argument that, no matter what political arrangements
were to be made, the Masters must be faced by the most powerful force the
Confederation could muster.
Kaiser,
after a long huddle with Mason and two other councilmen, proposed that each
star system expand its militia for better self-defense, and leave the Star
Watch to guard the interstellar communications routes.
"That's
no better than where we are now," Jeff said. "The present Star Watch
fleet can't jump around the Confederation fast enough to meet all the attacks
the enemy is staging. And even when we engage the enemy, we're too badly
outnumbered to win."
The
President shook his head wearily. "This is getting us no place," he
said. "I suggest we adjourn for the day and straighten out our thinking
about this."
The four of us—Jeff, Terry, Marsh, and
I—lingered in the Capitol building autorestaurant to discuss what had happened.
I could see through the plastiglass wall near our table that it was almost
sunset outside.
"Hines
has a legitimate point," Jeff was saying. "The more powerful you make
the Star Watch, the more risk you run of someone taking over and making himself
a dictator."
Marsh
shook his head. "The Council can exert control. . . ."
"Legally,
yes," Jeff said, "but a man with an army behind him can usually
outvote any government body."
"They'd
better decide quick," Terry frowned. "There's not much time left to
play around."
"That's
the trouble," Jeff pointed out. "And the Council has to come to a
unanimous agreement. . . ."
"Unanimous?" I
asked.
Jeff
nodded. "This is a Confederation, Alan; no star system—not even Earth and
the Solar system—has the right to impose its will on any other system. If all
the Council members agree on a course of action, then their home governments
take that as binding. But any councilman can disagree, and his home systems aren't
committed to doing anything they don't want to do."
I lapsed into a
Rh'khour'mnin exclamation.
"I
don't know what you said," Terry grinned, "but I agree with your tone
of voice."
Marsh
was staring moodily out the window. "Y'know, if the Council can't agree on
a firm plan tomorrow, they'll adjourn and we'll
probably drag on like this for another six months or so."
"If
the past six months are any indication of the future," I said, "the
war will be lost by then."
"By the way, Alan," Jeff said,
"I've been meaning to ask you how things went on Titan."
I
told him briefly of my visit to Dr. Lee's school, and ended by repeating the
old teacher's message: "Walls built to keep invaders outside also keep the
defenders inside."
"Well, that's pretty
obvious," Terry said.
Jeff smiled. "Obvious
as an iceberg," he said.
Just
then a harried-looking secretary scurried over to our table.
"Officer
Knowland?" she asked, then went on without waiting for an answer.
"The President would like to see you in his office, immediately."
We
all hustled out of the restaurant, up a lift-tube, and into the President's
suite. Jeff went into the private office while we waited outside with the
secretary.
In a few minutes Jeff came
out.
He looked dazed, and his
face was ghostly white.
"The
President has just received word...." his voice was trembling. "The
fleet . . . has been badly beaten at the frontier. My—my father has been
killed."
That was the last we saw of Jeff that night.
He rushed home in an autoflier to break the news to his mother. Terry, Marsh,
and I stayed around the capital to learn as much as we could about the
disastrous battle.
Marsh
used all the influence he could, and gradually we began to sift through the
rumors and unconfirmed reports that were spreading like wildfire over the city.
The
fleet was shattered, about one-third was totally destroyed. The rest had been
scattered over a volume of many light-years. The Saurians had evidently solidified
their supply lines to Scandia, and now they commanded a deep wedge pointed
toward the heart of the Terran Confederation.
The
night was one of wild excitment in the city, almost panic. Mobs drifted around
the government buildings—crowds of men and women who were confused and
frightened by the news that was leaking out to them. Finally, in an effort to
quiet their fears, the Information Agency released a carefully-worded report of
the battle. It announced the defeat, announced Heath Knowland's death, but did
not say that—for the time being, at least—there was no Star Watch fleet between
Earth and the enemy.
The
Council was in an entirely different mood the following morning.
Marsh,
Terry, and I were there early and watched the fifteen men file in and take
their seats. There was no chatter, no last-minute huddles. They simply sat
down. The Chief Coordinator of the Star Watch came in, flanked by several
aides.
No
one looked as though he had slept at all the night before. Probably no one had.
Finally, when they were all seated, Jeff strode into the chamber and went
straight to the seat beside the President.
The
President rose and put his hand on Jeff's shoulder. "There's no need for
you to continue your testimony," he said softly. "We understand the
shock you've had, and appreciate your courage in coming this morning. . .
."
Jeff stood ramrod-straight and said to the
older man, "Thank you, sir. But my duty—and yours—is here." He turned
to the other councilmen. "I've come here today to mourn my father in the
only way I know—by carrying on the work he gave his life
for."
A visible wave of emotion
swept the chamber.
"I
spent most of the night on
Mars, in conference with the Chief Coordinator," Jeff said, nodding toward
the aging officer.
"I thought he was home," Terry whispered.
Marsh shook his head.
"The
Chief Coordinator," Jeff went on, "has received reports during the
night that many of the survivors of yesterday's battle have shown up on
scattered star systems deeper within the Confederation. The fleet is
re-forming, and is being deployed under temporary command until a new Frontier
Coordinator is assigned."
Jeff
paused; then, staring straight at Councilman Mason, he said, "We have
discussed our plans in the light of this crippling defeat. The plan I proposed to you yesterday is still the only one we can see that has any
reasonable chance of success. However, the results of the frontier battle, and
some of the suggestions made yesterday have caused us to modify some of the
details."
Jeff
punched a button and the star map glowed into life. The councilmen leaned back
and saw a glaring red salient slashing through one side of the oval.
"This
is the wedge the enemy has driven into our Confederation. As you can see, it
not only imperils all the star systems around it, but the wedge itself is aimed
straight at Earth.
"What
we recommend is this: Councilman Kaiser's suggestion that local militias be
strengthened should be carried through as fast as possible. The Star Watch will
offer as many officers to train the men as it can. In this way, every star
system will be responsible for its own defense.
"Secondly,
the Star Watch fleet must be enlarged as quickly as possible to a size capable
of handling the invaders. This means making the fleet at least five times the
strength it was before yesterday's disaster.
"These
efforts will take time and money. The money we have ... the time we don't. So, to gain time, I have proposed—and the
Chief Coordinator agrees—that an expeditionary force be sent to raid the enemy
staging bases outside the Confederation."
"But
we don't know where their bases are or how big they are," a councilman
objected.
"I
know," Jeff agreed. "But with a sufficiently large and fast-moving
force we can find them and upset the Masters' timetable by destroying their
supplies and troop concentrations. And perhaps we can recruit other humans
outside the Confederation to join us in fighting the Masters."
"How big a force will
you need?" Hines asked.
"At
least five hundred thousand fighting men in a thousand or more battle cruisers
with support vehicles," Jeff snapped.
The
councilmen were too stunned to answer right away.
Finally
Hines asked, "But that's twice the size of the full Star Watch fleet;
where do you propose to get these men and ships?"
Jeff
replied without hesitation. "One-third will be battle veterans from the
fleet; one-third will come from the Home Guard here at the Solar system; the remainder
will be recruited from militia units throughout the Confederation."
"No!"
"Impossible."
"It can't be
done!"
Jeff
stared them all down. "Gentlemen," he said at last, "It's no
longer a matter of what we can do. It's a question of what we must do to stay alive and free. We can't defend ourselves adequately, and we
won't be strong enough to defend ourselves for many months. I'm hoping the
enemy doesn't realize that.
"We've
got to attack them. That's the only way to knock them off-balance and give us
the time we need to build up our defenses."
He
pointed to Hines. "We've modified our plan so that the defensive forces on
each star system will be under the control of the local government. That should
prevent a supermilitary organization from mushrooming into a
dictatorship."
Jeff
swept the room with his blazing eyes. "The Star Watch has organized a plan
of attack and defense . . . none of you has offered anything but
objections and reservations. The Star Watch has been fighting this battle for
ten years and more while you have ignored our requests for the power needed to
stop these attacks. Many men—including my father—have given their lives. For
what? Only you can answer.
"The plan is before
you. I suggest you vote on it."
It
was almost pure showmanship. But the President asked for a motion to vote.
Hines made the motion and Kaiser seconded it.
It had to be a unanimous
approval.
It was.
As we left the chamber I struggled through a
crowd of Star Watch officers to Jeff, who was walking beside the Chief
Coordinator.
"There
are many things I want to say about your father and you," I told him,
"but I have no words to express them."
"I
know," Jeff said, smiling tiredly. "Perhaps it's just as well. The
talking is ended now. It's time for work . . . and action."
ChaptCr 5 The First Battle
was standing on the control deck of Jeff's
flagship.
All around me officers and men who were not on
duty at the moment were
pressing in for a glimpse
of the fleet as it cruised
by in review.
"This,"
said one grizzled tech, "is the most awe-inspiring thing I've ever
seen."
We
were all staring at the main viewscreen as ship after ship, for more than an
hour, sailed past and joined formation. In the background was the ruddy,
crisscrossed disc of Mars.
The
ships kept coming: huge, saucer-shaped cruisers, needle-nosed landing craft,
sleek scouts and picket ships, and the sturdy, vital repair vehicles.
Finally,
all was ready. The men at the viewscreen dispersed as the techs took their
positions at the ship's controls. Overlooking the control deck was the bridge,
where Jeff and his staff were poring over last-minute reports and instructions,
Jeff's command consisted of a striking force
of fast, powerful ships that could range through enemy territory to destroy
communications and supplies. His tactics would depend largely on surprise, and
on the fact that ships under superlight drive in subspace could not be easily
detected or followed. They could not even communicate with each other over
distances greater than a few light-minutes. Even simple voice beams warp out of
shape very quickly in subspace.
This
was the force that would carry the attack to the enemy.
All
eyes turned to Jeff as the last ship joined the formation. He glanced at the
bridge's atomic clock, then nodded to the ship's captain. The captain touched a
series of buttons and the vibration of subnuclear drive took over.
The
Terran Expeditionary Force was assembled, and on its way.
Mission:
To upset the enemy's invasion timetable by quick, sharp strikes at his staging
bases.
Ultimate destination:
Unknown.
The expeditionary force's take-off for
enemy-held territory was the result of six weeks' feverish activity by Jeff and
his supporters in the Star Watch and Council.
The
Intelligence Center's computers had estimated that the next Saurian attack on
the Confederation would come within eight to ten weeks of the disastrous
defeat of the main Star Watch fleet. This estimate was based on the timing of
previous enemy offenses.
If
the expeditionary force was to upset the Masters' timetable and give the
Terrans time to patch up their battered defenses, it would have to be ready to
strike its first blow in less than eight weeks.
All
of us worked day and night from the moment the Council voted in favor of Jeff's
idea. But it was Jeff, himself, who worked hardest, longest, and with the most
success. With the Council behind him, Jeff had the authority to organize the
expedition; but putting together such a powerful fleet in just a few weeks was
another matter.
Jeff
seemed to be all over the Confederation at once during those hectic weeks. By
ship, by tri-di, by personal representatives (including myself), Jeff and his
requests for men and weapons appeared on every Terran star system.
And
the young man showed surprising reservoirs of skill and persuasion.
He
needled a slow-moving colonial governor until the exasperated politician was
glad to give Jeff the men and ships he wanted, just to get rid of him. When
told that it would be impossible for Arcturus to furnish any troops for his
force, Jeff made a public tri-di request for men, and three times the number
he had originally asked for volunteered. A Star Watch survivor of the battle
that killed Jeff's father thundered that his men and ships had seen enough
action and needed a rest; Jeff outshouted him. He wheedled, coaxed, threatened,
and begged until he got what he wanted.
Only
then did he return to the Star Watch's Prime Base on Mars.
I
was with Jeff when he reported to the Chief Coordinator. The old man at first
tried to mask his surprise as he leafed through page after page of reports on
what each star system had contributed in men, materiel, and ships. Finally, as
the pages literally covered his desk, he looked up in obvious elation.
"You've
done a wonderful job, son. A magnificent job. I never dreamed that anyone could
pull so much out of them in such a short time."
But
Jeff shook his head solemnly. "Getting the force together is only a
mechanical chore. The real task hasn't begun yet."
The Coordinator said
nothing.
"Who's going to command the force?"
Jeff asked point-blank.
The Coordinator smiled. "Are you
applying for the job?" "Yes."
"It's
been yours for the asking since the Council approved the idea."
Jeff
exhaled like a man who had been holding his breath for several minutes. He
thanked the Coordinator and we stood up to leave.
"Just
a moment," the old man said. "I want to tell you something."
He
rose from his chair and walked around the desk to stand directly in front of
Jeff. He was much taller than Jeff, but years of decisions and defeats had
taken its toll on his body. He looked faded, crumpled, and his uniform hung
limply on his frame. Jeff stood straight and firm as a sword.
"Many
men—even some of my own staff—regard this expeditionary force of yours as a
suicide squad, sent out to buy time with blood while we rebuild the fleet and
fortify the Confederation."
"I know," Jeff
said.
"Like all rumors, this one has a kernel
of truth in it. You are
being sent to buy time for
us. And we have no idea of the opposition you'll be up against. . . but I want
you to know that you will not be expected to fight and die against impossible
odds.
"Your
father was the ablest officer and
best friend I ever had. He served me well for many years; and I feel his death
as my responsibility. I don't want your death on my shoulders, too."
Jeff
returned the old man's level gaze. "Death is inevitable," he said.
"My father knew that. I only hope that I can serve the same cause he
served as well as he did . . . and that people realize that any blow we can
strike at the Masters now is because of defenses he organized and ran for so
many thankless years."
"Exactly," the
Coordinator murmured.
"I
know my mission," Jeff continued. "Although we'll be outnumbered, at
least we'll be able to pick the times and places to attack. We'll have the
advantage of surprise and, as much as possible, superiority of numbers in the
local areas we hit. We'll be using the Masters' own tactics against them."
The
Coordinator smiled. "The optimism of youth," he said. "Here .
.." he reached across the desk and took a small box in his hand. "If
you're going to command the expeditionary force, I think you'll have need of
these."
He handed
the box to Jeff, who opened it. Inside were two small diamond clips: the
insignia of a full commander.
"The
official papers will come through before your fleet takes off," the
Coordinator said as he shook Jeff's hand. "I know we won't be able to see each other again unless there's a crowd with us . . .
but I won't say good-by. I won't even wish you luck, because luck comes to
those who work for it, not through wishful thinking. I'll only say that you
wouldn't have been placed in charge of this force if I, personally, didn't think
you were the best man for the job."
That
was how Jeff received command of the expeditionary force. The rumors about a
suicide mission persisted, of course. And it was true that the Star Watch's
top-ranking officers were all kept inside the Confederation.
But if the rumors bothered
Jeff, he never showed it.
Two
experienced Star Watch officers were assigned to head Jeff's staff: Sector
Commander Daguerre, a blustering old war horse from the Castor system, descended
from French-Canadian colonists; and Unit Commander Panjart, a slim, silent
Indian from Bengal.
The
rest of Jeff's staff, though, belonged to what was dubbed on Mars as the
"youth movement." Marsh was promoted to Chief Technical Officer and placed in charge of navigation for the whole expedition. Terry was
made a Patrol Commander and given direct command of the expedition's landing
troops. I still bore the informal title of Special Adjutant, and became Jeff's liaison officer and trouble-shooter.
At
Jeff's insistance, several shiploads of scientists were added to the fleet.
Now,
as the expeditionary force got under way, I crossed the control deck from the
main viewscreen to the short ladder that led to the bridge. The touch of my
foot on a rung started the ladder, which carried me to the bridge and stopped
moving when I stepped off.
Jeff was standing by the
chart table.
"Well, we're on our way," he said,
grinning. "Yes."
"How's the crew feel?" he asked.
"They
were excited as the fleet formed up," I reported. "There is a
curious mixture of emotions: eagerness and fear, a desire to search out the
enemy's homeworlds and destroy them . . . and at the same time a desire to be
safely home and far from the war."
Jeff
nodded. "That's about what I expected. Same way I feel, in fact."
He
looked out at the bridge's viewscreen. Mars was already a tiny dot, and die
ships of the fleet were sprinkled across the sky as far as I could see. Beyond
the limits of telescopic vision, each ship was represented on the screen as a
tiny electronic dot.
"This
is what I asked for," Jeff said. "A fleet that can fight, run, and
fight again; a self-sufficient combat force with the range and power to carry
the battle to the enemy."
"One
thing that puzzles me," I said, "is the number of scientists you've
brought along with us. I can see the need for engineers and technicians . . .
but why so many anthropologists, physicists, historians, biologists, and all
the others? There must be hundreds of them."
Jeff's
mouth curved into a strange, enigmatic smile. "No one knows how far we're
going to penetrate into enemy territory, or how long we'll be away from home.
If things go as I hope, we'll soon be in areas that no Terran
has ever seen before. Then scientists will be more important to us than all the
soldiers we have."
I
watched him as he ran a hand along the star map on the chart table.
"We'll need the scientists," he
said quietly, "simply
because
we're going to be sailing completely off the known maps. . . ."
Our first raids were,
happily, successful.
Jeff
struck first at the group of stars the Terrans call Orion. Unlike most
constellations, which are composed of stars that are really far distant from
each other but happen to be in the same line of sight from the observer, the
Orion group is actually a loose cluster of hundreds of stars and large clouds
of interstellar gas and dust.
The
expeditionary force cruised out of the Terran Confederation in superlight
overdrive. Undetected as it sped through subspace, the main fleet proceeded
toward Orion behind a cloud of scouts. After a week Jeff had enough information
to decide where he wanted to strike first.
He
called his staff together on the bridge of his cruiser. Standing before the
chart table, he told us:
"The
scouts have been snooping out about a hundred light-years from the main fleet.
They've investigated several star systems, and the Saurians seem to have only
one major base in this immediate area." Jeff took a marking stylus from
the chart table and circled one of the stars on the map.
"This
is Bellatrix," he said, "a big, hot blue star. There are six planets
circling it. The Saurians have a base on Bellatrix II. As far as we know, our
scouts have been undetected ... so
we'll hit them tomorrow with everything we have. I want that base totally
destroyed."
And it was.
The fleet popped out of
subspace within a few minutes' flight of Bellatrix II. The garrison of the
Saurian base was completely surprised. Only a handful of enemy ships were aloft
when the fleet attacked.
The
first attack was aimed at enemy spaceports and force-beam projectors. Our big
attack cruisers pounded them with beams and missiles, overpowering the energy
screens that shielded them and leaving most of the enemy installations in
smoking ruin.
Inside
of three hours after first appearing off the planet, Jeff was sending Terry and
his troops down to finish off the garrison. The Saurians were dazed and
confused; they fought hard in many places, but were never able to coordinate a
planet-wide defense. Before the day was out, every enemy facility on the planet
was destroyed, and the surviving Saurian troops had scattered in pell-mell
retreat to the hills and underbrush.
Twenty-four
hours after the first attack had hit Bellatrix II, the expeditionary force's
main fleet was back in subspace, heading for its next target. The planet behind
us was useless as a military base.
Events shaped up quickly
after that first raid.
The
scouts, ranging farther than before, reported that the Saurians had similar
bases on planets of the three stars that compose Orion's "belt" ... as the constellation is seen from
Earth. All three stars were blue giants, like Bellatrix.
These
three stars—labelled Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta Orionis on the Terran star
charts—lay directly before the fleet. They were roughly a hundred light-years
apart from one another, and the closest one, Zeta, was about a hundred
light-years from Bellatrix.
Meanwhile, other scouts reported a base of
some sort on a Jupiter-like planet of a red dwarf star lying off our left
flank. This star was not on the Terran maps, so Jeff sent Unit Commander
Panjart out with a small squadron of ships to "reconnoiter in force."
Jeff also included a few astronomers and map makers in Panjart's squadron.
Panjart
found the planet to be a base for Hydra— the squidlike creatures who inhabit
the ammonia oceans of large, cold, low-density planets like Jupiter and Saturn.
Although his ships were not built to enter the planet's thousand-mile-deep
atmosphere, Panjart parked his force in orbit around the planet and blasted as
much of the enemy's base as his search scanners could find.
The
Hydra came up to counterattack, which was just what Panjart wanted. Once he had
them in space, he outmaneuvered, outshot, and outfought them. Of the hundred or
so enemy ships that came up to fight, less than twenty definitely escaped
Panjart's eager gunners.
Again,
the enemy seemed totally surprised and bewildered by the presence of a Terran
force in their own territory.
Zeta Orionis was different.
The
fleet started its second major raid about a week after the first attack on
Bellatrix II. This time, though, our scouts had been spotted, and the enemy was
alert and waiting for us with ships aloft and planetary bases geared for
action.
The
main Saurian base was on the first planet orbiting around Zeta, although they
had secondary bases on each of the other four planets in the system.
Jeff chose to ignore the secondary bases and
strike first at the main center. It was tricky, flying through subspace so
close to the gravitational field of a giant star as powerful as this one, but
Marsh navigated us to within ten minutes of the innermost planet.
The
fleet had to come out of subspace all at once if we were not to be picked off,
one at a time, by the prowling Saurian patrol ships. The maneuver was performed
beautifully, and the startled Saurians were suddenly confronted with almost a
thousand battle cruisers materializing before their noses. They never expected
a force that size.
It
was a bitter fight, but the Terrans had a clear-cut numerical advantage.
We
slashed our way through the defending patrols right to the planet itself and
blasted everything we could see. While the space battle was still going on,
Terry landed his troops on the planet and mopped up what was left of the
Saurian base. By the time he was finished, the enemy patrols had been beaten
and most of the fleet's battle cruisers were blasting the secondary bases on
the outer planets.
"The first time we surprised them just
by being there," Jeff said over a steaming mug of coffee. "Yesterday,
we surprised them with our strength. I think that's all the surprises we can
expect to launch for awhile."
We
were sitting in Jeff's compartment, just off the ship's bridge. Terry, Marsh,
and I were occupying the small room's only chairs; Jeff was slouched on his
bunk, sipping coffee.
On
the table beside the bunk was a tangled pile of tapes, reports from the scoutships.
From time to time an orderly would appear in the doorway with more.
"No
doubt about it now," Marsh said. "They know there's a big Terran
force in their back yard, and they're organizing a fleet to crush us."
"More than one
fleet," Jeff said.
With
characteristic impatience, Terry burst, "Well, what are we gonna do about
it? Do we fight or run?"
"Which would you
prefer?" Jeff grinned.
Terry
opened his mouth to answer, shut it, thought a minute, then said merely,
"Depends."
Jeff
laughed. "Right, old hothead. We know there's a lot of movement going on
in several enemy bases .. . but we don't know enough to act on
yet."
Slowly
the information accumulated, and it all looked bad. As the reports came in from
scoutships —several of which never returned to the fleet—they were processed
through the data computers, which built up a picture of enemy moves, probable
intentions, and the probabilities of success for various possible Terran
countermoves.
Briefly, the picture was
this:
The
Terran Force was sailing toward Epsilon Orionis, the second of the
"belt" stars, which harbored a big enemy base. Within two days we
would be there, ready to attack. According to our scouts, the Epsilon base was
manned, not by Saurians, but by the human-oids who had participated in the
final battle for Scandia.
When
Terry heard this, he was all for hitting the base as soon as possible,
regardless of the cost.
But
the scouts had also reported a huge enemy fleet heading for Epsilon from the
opposite direction, from
Rigel.
And a smaller enemy force had already left Delta Orionis, the third of the
three "belt" stars, and taken up a position off the flank of the
Epsilon system.
"They're
building a trap," Marsh said, "and those humanoids are the
bait."
But
the information that electrified us was that an even bigger enemy fleet was
following us—about a week's flight behind.
"There's
nothing behind us but blasted enemy bases," Jeff told us, "and the
Confederation. This third enemy fleet must be their invasion fleet!"
Jeff
had accomplished what he had set out to do: the fleet that had been attacking
Terran star systems was now outside the Confederation, hunting for the
expeditionary force!
Commander
Daguerre shook his head as he looked over the computer's estimates of the
enemy's strength. "Too many," he said. "We can't face them all
at once . . . there are just too many of them."
Jeff
said nothing. He stayed in his cabin almost the entire day before we were
scheduled to reach the Epsilon system. Outside, on the bridge, the communications
ticker chugged out fresh report tapes, and the computers digested and analyzed
them; men went through their duties automatically; you could feel the tension
building up all through the ship.
In
subspace, flying faster than light, it was impossible to communicate with the
whole fleet at once; orders had to be relayed from ship to ship. We were
scheduled to come out of superlight drive once more— for a navigational check
and final orders—before the final day's run to Epsilon.
About an hour before the scheduled
navigational check, Jeff came out on the bridge and called his staff officers
together.
"I've
formulated a plan of battle," he said. "I'd like to hear your
opinions of it."
We
looked around at each other. So Jeff was going to fight!
Jeff
sat down by the computer, and we all dragged up chairs and sat around him.
"The
reports we've received look pretty complete now," he began. "The
humanoid force on the Epsilon system is about the size of our fleet; the fleet
from Delta Orionis is still patrolling just outside the Epsilon system—that
force is about half our size; the Saurians coming down from Rigel outnumber us
two-to-one; and the invasion fleet following us out of the Confederation is
also about twice our size."
"Overwhelming
odds," Commander Daguerre complained. "More than five to one. . .
."
"Yes,"
Jeff agreed, "if you lump them all together." He stood up and walked
to the chart table. "But look at their positions. The invasion fleet is a
week behind us . . . the Rigel fleet won't reach Epsilon until a day or more
after we do."
"That whittles 'em
down for us," Terry said.
"No,
I'm afraid not," Commander Panjart objected. "It will take us at
least a day to conquer the humanoid base . . . perhaps longer. While we are so
engaged, the fleets from Rigel and Delta will combine and overpower us."
"If
we stop to hit the humanoids on Epsilon," Jeff said.
"You can't bypass
them," Commander Daguerre pointed out, "and leave a force our own
size free to strike us in the rear."
"I know," Jeff
said. "But this is what we can do:
"The
humanoids are just sitting on their planet, waiting for us to come down and set
off their trap. We can't ignore them . . . and we can't leave them alone,
either. But what's to stop us from hitting them hard and fast with just part of
our fleet. . . never landing on the planet, but destroying their spaceports
from aloft so they can't take off and attack us."
Marsh
lighted up with delight. "It's beautiful! Then the main fleet can bypass
the humanoid base and hit the Rigel fleet long before they expect to meet
us."
"Right," Jeff
said. "We'll be trapping the trappers."
Commander
Daguerre shook his shaggy mane. "It is very dangerous to split up the
fleet in the face of such odds."
"It's
either that or run away," Jeff said. "And I'm not running when we've
got that invasion fleet out of the Confederation. We've got to destroy that
fleet, or at least cripple it so badly that the Masters won't be able to
continue their attacks on the Confederation."
Commander
Daguerre rose from his chair. "What you propose is extremely risky . . .
but you're right. If we run away now, we destroy the goal we set out for. What
are your orders?"
Jeff
looked into the old officer's eyes. He said nothing, but his expression
told us all how he valued this vote of confidence.
"The
plan of battle," he said at last, "will be this: Terry, you will take
a fast striking force and raid the Epsilon system; your goal will be to destroy
all spaceports and launching facilities . . . keep those humane-ids grounded,
so we can deal with them later. Once this is accomplished, you'll engage the
fleet from Delta, keep them busy while our main strength is attacking the Rigel
fleet.
"Commander
Daguerre, you will take a squadron of cruisers and guard our rear against the
vanguard of the Saurian invasion fleet. If necessary, you can also lend support
to Terry's command.
"I'll
take the main fleet and speed toward the approaching force from Rigel. If we
can hit them before they expect us, so much the better. Once they're broken up,
we'll pivot and fall on the flank of the Delta fleet. Then we'll all join
forces to meet the invasion fleet."
He looked around at us.
"Any questions?"
"Just one," Terry
said. "When do I start?"
Jeff grinned. "Right
now."
When
the fleet broke out of subspace for its last navigational check, Terry shuttled
across from Jeff's command ship to his own attack cruiser.
Meanwhile, Jeff addressed all the men of the
expeditionary force on the tri-di.
"Men,
in the past two weeks we've proved that Terrans can fight—and win—against the
so-called invincible troops of the Masters. Now we're heading for a showdown
against the best fleets the Masters can throw against us.
"They'll
have more ships than we do—but not better ships. And they'll have more men than
we do—but not better men. The only thing I can promise you is a solid week or
more of the hardest fighting we've faced yet. But if each of us does the best
he's capable of, the final outcome will be a smashing victory for us.
"I want you to remember only one more
thing: A large part of the enemy forces we'll be up against consists of the
fleet that's been attacking the Confederation. We'll be facing the Saurians
who've raided our homes and killed our people. We've interrupted their invasion
of Terran worlds; now we have a chance to destroy the invaders
themselves!"
Within
a half hour Terry's raiders split off from the main fleet and headed for the
humanoid base on Epsilon. Commander Daguerre's rear guard took up its position,
and the rest of the expeditionary force accelerated back into subspace, aiming
for the approaching Saurian fleet from Rigel.
We
broke out of subspace for good and took up battle positions the following
morning, after passing the Delta fleet that was still poised off one side of
the Epsilon star system.
Almost
as soon as we returned to normal space we began getting reports from Terry's
group. They had attacked the humanoid base as planned; the enemy had hundreds
of patrol ships orbiting around their planet and a fierce battle was in
progress. The results were still in doubt.
Meanwhile,
Jeff's scouts were sending back word that the approaching fleet from Rigel was
heading toward us at full speed. The scouts harassed the oncoming Saurians by
destroying as many enemy ships as possible whenever they popped out of subspace
to make a navigational check. After six lone enemy ships had been destroyed in
that one day, the Saurians began using full squadrons for their navigational
checks. That discouraged the scouts.
Everything and everybody in the fleet seemed
to be in frenzied motion as we prepared for battle. Everything and everybody,
that is, except Jeff.
He
sat calmly on the bridge, the map table to his left, the viewscreen to his
right, and the data computer a few steps behind him. His watchful eye took in
all the activity of the control deck below his perch. But although he was
outwardly calm, his mind was racing all over his well-deployed fleet. I doubt
that there was a single report coming in to the ship that he did not personally
read.
Just
as the computer finished its final prebattle estimate of the enemy's size and
position, we got a tri-di report from Terry himself.
You
could tell the result of the battle by his flushed, exultant face even before
he had said a word.
"We
hobbled 'em for you," his voice boomed over the viewscreen's speaker.
"They put up an awful fight, but their patrol ships are no match for our
cruisers."
Jeff beamed.
"We
knocked off their patrols," Terry went on, "then blasted out every
rocketport and launching pad we could find. We really pasted the planet.
There'll be no traffic in or out unless we land, ourselves."
"Fine,"
Jeff said. "Did the Saurian fleet from Delta give you any trouble?"
Terry
shook his head vigorously. "Nope. They're still parked out there. Either
they're waiting for us to land on the planet, so they can hit us from behind,
or they're waiting for your ships to show up and fight."
"Good.
Now, do you still have enough ships to engage them in a holding action?"
"Sure!
We'll chase em all the way back to where they came from if you want us
to."
Jeff grinned. "No, not yet. Just keep
them busy while we tackle the Rigel fleet. Any word from Daguerre?"
"Uh-uh.
Everything's peaceful in his sector." "Fine. Well, we've got a chore
coming up. Congratulations . . . keep up the good work." "We intend
to!" Terry said.
Minutes
later, the first units of the Rigel fleet walked into Jeff's trap.
The
classic tactic of space warfare is englobement: trapping your enemy inside a
sphere of your ships. The enemy cannot run because he would be disintegrated
when he hits the overlapping energy screens of your ships; and with several
ships pouring force beams on any one enemy target, it is only a matter of
minutes before his energy screen is overpowered and the ship is destroyed.
Like
most textbook schemes, the situation rarely occurs in actual battle.
But
in this first deep-space battle between Jeff's expeditionary force and the
Saurian fleet from Rigel, the opportunity presented itself . . . and Jeff
pounced on it.
The
Saurians undoubtedly realized after the events of the preceding twenty-four
hours that they were much closer to battle than they had originally estimated.
So they sent three squadrons out of subspace to make a final navigational check
and reconnoiter the area.
The
squadrons materialized in three separate spots close to the waiting Terran
fleet. As the enemy ships showed up on the control deck's tracking screen, Jeff
snapped out a single command:
"Englobe them!"
Before
the Saurians realized what was happening, they were surrounded and blasted by
the nearest of the Terran units. They tried to escape, but were trapped and
outnumbered.
Abruptly,
it was over. The last Saurian ship was destroyed and the Terrans returned to
formation. No more Saurians appeared.
"They're
trying to figure out what to do," Jeff half-whispered.
The
lighted numbers of the bridge's atomic clock crawled along: five minutes . . .
ten . . . twenty. . . .
Jeff
paced over to the viewscreen and punched a button.
"Attention,
all ships," he commanded. "I want you to spread out as far as you can
without opening a gap in the energy screens. The enemy will be coming out of
subspace any minute; he may appear where the scouts did, but more likely he'll
choose another spot. I want our fleet to cover as much area as possible without
scattering too much. Be prepared to move fast in any direction as soon as the
Saurians materialize."
On
the tracking screen I could see Jeff's ships spreading out in obedience to his
command. Jeff was building a giant net, and betting that the enemy would appear
close enough to be trapped in it.
Exactly
thirty minutes after the last Saurian scout had been destroyed, the whole Rigel
fleet emerged from subspace.
The
enemy ships appeared in a single close-knit grouping off the upper left corner
of Jeff's formation.
They outnumbered us, and
they knew it. They were not worried about being en globed, since a smaller
force cannot possibly surround a larger fleet—theoretically. They had come out
of subspace in a tight formation so that they could concentrate their
firepower on the Terran ships.
But
the Saurians did not realize how good the Terran pilots were.
Like
a parade-field exercise, Jeff swung his fleet around in perfect order and
attempted an englobe-ment of the Saurians. The Terran ships were strung out as
far from each other as they could go without opening gaps between their energy
screens.
The
Saurians either did not realize what was happening, or did not believe the
Terrans could accomplish the maneuver successfully. They stayed in their tight
formation and flew right into the net Jeff was closing about them.
What followed is hard to
describe in words.
As
the two fleets closed in on each other, the battle turned into a thousand
separate fights between individual ships. Jeff had maneuvered his men into the
best possible position, it was now Terran against Saurian, with the odds
two-to-one in the enemy's favor.
I
lost all concept of fleet strategy. I know that Jeff was barking orders and
jockeying his ships constantly throughout the battle. But as I stood on the
bridge watching the tracking screens and scanners, all that registered on my
mind was a series of flashing images:
A
Terran cruiser exchanging shots simultaneously with two enemy saucer-ships; a
Saurian ship blooming into a brilliant flare of radiance as it ran into someone's
energy screen; the drifting hulk of an unrecognizable ship split by force
beams; three tiny Terran scouts pouring force beams into a giant battle cruiser
until the big Saurian's energy screen collapsed and the ship burst open in a
titanic explosion.
It
all seemed unreal, dreamlike, as I watched the battle from Jeff's bridge. There
were no sounds except the scuffling of men's feet on the control deck below us,
Jeff's urgent voice, and the constant hum of power that pervaded the ship. The
firing, the explosions, the twisting, fighting ships I saw on the screens were
all silent in the emptiness of space.
The
battle took on a definite pattern now. The Terran ships were all around the
enemy, and the Saurians were bunched in a huddled, confused mass. The
englobement had been successful. Many of the Saurian ships could not even fire
at us because they were trapped in the middle of their own formation.
What
had started as a battle was fast becoming nothing but target practice. Ship
after ship of the Saurians flared into sunburst explosions as the surrounding
Terrans concentrated the fire from two, three and even more ships on individual
enemy targets.
The
Saurian ships twisted and dodged and tried to break through the sphere of
Terrans that hemmed them in. All to no avail.
It
looked as though nothing could save the Saurians from a complete massacre when
Jeff's viewscreen sounded its emergency signal.
It was a call from
Commander Daguerre.
"The
Saurian invasion fleet," he reported worriedly, "is much closer than
we had anticipated. Already its advance units are engaging my ships!"
Jeff frowned. Here he had the chance to
annihilate the Rigel fleet . . . but if he remained to finish the slaughter,
Daguerre's rear guard squadron would probably be lost to the approaching
invasion fleet.
"All
right," Jeff decided. "I'll break off our engagement here and get to
you as soon as possible. Hold on for further orders."
"Yes, sir,"
Daguerre replied.
What
followed took quick thinking and rapid, precise maneuvering.
Jeff
disengaged his fleet from the battered Saurians and started off to Daguerre's
rescue. The distance involved was too short for a subspace hop, but long
enough to cause us all a lot of anxiety.
What
was left of the Rigel fleet limped back toward its home base. The battle had
cost Jeff fourteen cruisers and thirty-seven scouts definitely lost, plus a
few hundred ships damaged in various degrees of seriousness. The Saurians had
more than half their fleet wiped out, and the survivors were probably in no frame
of mind to fight again for a long time.
Between
Jeff and the oncoming invasion fleet was Terry's holding force and the small
Saurian fleet from Delta Orionis. Something had to be done about them. No one
knew whether they would run away with the Rigel survivors, or try to join the
invasion fleet.
In
an attempt to bluff the Delta fleet out of the area, Jeff temporarily split his
force in two, sending Commander Panjart, with a unit of fast attack-cruisers,
around the Saurians, while he slowed his approach to the enemy fleet. It took
almost half a day to accomplish the maneuver exactly the way Jeff wanted it,
but it was worth the effort and delay.
At the end of the same day
that had seen the fleet from Rigel crushed, the Saurian commander of the Delta
fleet was suddenly confronted with two Terran forces—both equal in size to his
own command—bearing in on him from opposite directions, like the jaws of a
trap snapping down.
Outflanked,
cut off both from the retreating Rigel fleet and the approaching invasion
fleet, and still facing a determined holding attack by Terry's ships, the
Saurian commander took Jeff's unmistakable hint: he broke away and headed for
deep space, accelerating as fast as he could to superlight speed and the safety
of subspace.
Jeff
was grinning broadly as he watched the tracking screen. "They're running
just as fast as they can," he said.
"It seems that
way," I agreed.
"Don't
worry," Jeff said. "We'll put a scouting squadron on their tail to
make sure they don't stop and come back to hit us from behind."
But
our celebration over the bloodless rout of the second enemy force was cut short
by a steady stream of urgent messages from Commander Daguerre. The whole
Saurian invasion fleet was out of subspace now, heading for Epsilon. Daguerre was
trying to slow them down by hit-and-run tactics, but he had to fight on the
run, and the Saurians were riddling his ships.
"This
is it," Jeff said grimly, as we sped toward the enemy. "No holds
barred, no quarter asked or given. Them or us."
Jeff
chose to swing slightly to one side of the oncoming Saurians, so that he could
hit them from a different direction and make them pull away from Daguerre's
group.
As
we neared the enemy fleet, our tracking screen began to look like a blizzard,
with each "snowflake" representing a Saurian ship. We all saw that we
would be outnumbered by far more than two to one.
But
only Jeff saw a chance for victory in the formation of the enemy. He noticed
it instinctively, I think, and he took full advantage of it without a moment's
hesitation.
"Look at how strung
out they are," he said to me.
Only
then did I realize what he had seen at once: the Saurian fleet was spreading
itself thin in an attempt to wipe out Daguerre's retreating squadron. The
fastest Saurian ships were leading the chase, while the heavier ones were
lagging behind in an elongated column that was noticeably weak in several
places.
Even
as I was taking in what Jeff had spotted, he was on the viewscreen crackling
out orders. He kept all three units of his fleet—Terry's, Panjart's, and his
own—together for one powerful thrust at the weakened middle of the Saurian
line.
We
swooped in on them at top sublight speed and smashed through the enemy ships
easily. Then we swung around and faked an englobement maneuver on the rear
section of the shattered Saurian line. They pulled back, trying to avoid our
trap, while the forward section—which had been battering Daguerre's
squadron—abruptly stopped and attempted to break into our formation.
Surprised
and stunned, the Saurians had panicked. In their haste to avoid an englobement,
they had scattered most of their fleet beyond recall. The Terrans, under
Jeff's deadly-calm direction, pivoted back and forth, knocking off the
stragglers and breaking up the enemy's attempts to reorganize their formations.
Once
again, man for man and ship for ship, the Terrans proved themselves better
fighters than the Saurians. Jeff's tactics had nullified the enemy's superior
numbers, and now the Saurians were being shot to pieces by the men they had
planned to conquer.
Jeff
shook his head as he watched the battle turn into a rout. "They've been so
used to beating us easily that they just got careless, I guess."
The
crowning touch came when Daguerre's almost crippled little squadron turned on
the biggest Saurian dreadnaught in the fleet and blasted it to atoms.
Only
a handful of Saurians escaped the vengeful Terrans.
"They
didn't have any troopships with 'em," Terry complained as the battle died
down.
"No,"
Jeff said, "they were strictly a battle fleet. The invasion troops are
still back in the Confederation, I guess. But they won't be going anywhere
without their fleet to protect them."
"Guess
not. Well, let's get down to that planet and wipe out those humanoids on
Epsilon, then back to the Confederation and finish the Saurian troops."
Jeff
shook his head, "Not yet. They'll both have to wait. Besides, I want our
scientists to study the humanoids for awhile from orbit. I want to know who
they are and why they're serving the Masters."
And with that step the
whole picture changed.
The
boy became a man, the warrior became a statesman, and the history of the
entire galaxy was permanently altered.
Chapter 6 Tavh
i |
HE next six months were busy ones for all of us.
Jeff had passed his first test as a military leader. With the main enemy fleets
destroyed or routed, he had conquered an area roughly five hundred light-years
in radius, more than five times the size of the Terran Confederation. His first
act was to send Commander Daguerre and Terry to consolidate the territory and
clean out any remaining Saurian detachments or bases.
But
we soon discovered that this area was inhabited by several human races, and
immediately Jeff's overriding ambition was to make allies of them.
"We
need these people on our side. The Confederation just doesn't have the
manpower to beat the Masters singlehanded," Jeff said to me.
So,
while Terry and his men were eliminating isolated Saurian bases, and
Daguerre's ships were patrolling the frontiers of this newly-conquered
territory, Jeff set up his headquarters on one of the human-
123
populated
planets, the capital of a group of star systems which the natives called
Morenia.
Physically,
the Morenians more closely resembled my own people than the Terrans. They were
short and slight, fair-haired and light skinned. I could see that they were
both curious and afraid of the big, boisterous, barbaric Terrans who had overthrown
the only government they had known for countless generations.
Their
capital planet was a pleasant world; the seat of an ancient and serene culture.
The entire planet was as carefully cultivated and landscaped as any formal
garden; even the weather was controlled so that Morenia displayed an endless
succession of sparkling, fresh days and cool, still nights. I found this
relaxing, but several of the Terrans complained that even perfect weather gets
monotonous after a while.
There
were no cities on Morenia, no groundcars and no roads. This, too, the Terrans
found difficult to accept. The Morenians were spread all over their beautiful
pastoral countryside, living in sun-powered homes, meeting for social
gatherings in large, gracefully-sweeping domes of sparkling metal and plastic.
They
traveled almost exclusively by antigravity, using a tiny, fist-sized propulsive
unit instead of the unwieldy flying suits the Terrans knew.
Jeff
took one of the big meeting-domes for his headquarters, with the pleasant
agreement of the More-nian leaders. They seemed to have only a rudimentary
planetary government, and their interstellar affairs had been entirely in the
hands of the Saurians—and the Masters—before we arrived.
Jeff launched into negotiations with the
Morenian leaders immediately. He wanted them to join his fleet and fight against
the Masters. But they had never known any other government, and their lives
were not uncomfortable. They had been happy to have the Masters make all their
decisions for them, and were not accustomed to making their own. Many of them
feared that the Masters would soon return to crush the Terrans, and punish any
Morenians who joined the Terrans; others feared Jeff and his men, and the
strange new attitudes and problems they represented.
While
all this was going on, Terry and his men were methodically going from planet to
planet, wiping out Saurian strongholds. The Saurians fought hard in many
places, but without a fleet to help them, they were doomed. The shattered
remnants of the defeated fleets had left the area completely.
Commander
Daguerre's scouts reported many fleeting, shadowy contacts with enemy patrol
ships out at the frontier of the newly-conquered territory. There was a lot of
movement going on, but no massing for attack.
So far.
"They're
waiting and watching," Jeff said, as he leafed through his scout's
reports. "They've got time on their side, and numbers. .. they can throw a million ships at us if
they want to."
"It
takes time to gather a million ships from all over the galaxy," I pointed
out.
"I
know. But how much time?" Jeff mused. "How long do we have before
they counterattack?"
But
while the Masters waited, Jeff and his men were in a fever of activity. He
established the new territory as a buffer between the Confederation and the
Masters. He devoted more and more of his time to negotiations with the Morenian
leaders. Terry, after some truly heroic work in cleaning up the last Saurian
bases in the area, got his wish and was sent back to the Confederation to lead
the liberation of Scandia and the other Terran star systems seized by the
Sau-rians. Marsh took charge of many of the administrative chores of running
the fleet.
I
was assigned to questioning the few prisoners we had been able to take from the
Saurians and Hydra.
For
the first time in my life I found myself in a position of command over a
Saurian, but still it was an unpleasant experience.
Saurian
and human vocal systems operate on mutually incompatible sound frequencies, so I had to use telepathy. It was exhausting work—especially since I was
getting no cooperation from the prisoners.
For
days on end I sat in a bare little room, while a drugged Saurian stood drowsily
on his hind legs and tail before me, his scales glinting feebly in the room's
softened lighting, his long snout sagging until all his jagged teeth were
visible, his malevolent little eyes flickering weakly under the effect of the
sedatives.
We
would face each other for hours, with an energy screen between us, as I probed
the Saurian's mind, going gradually deeper and deeper until one of us was
exhausted. The information I got, whether it was from former governors over the
Morenians or the lowest-class space hands, was of little value to the
Ter-rans, and certainly not worth the effort it took to get it.
With
the Hydra, in their specially refrigerated tanks of liquid ammonia and
hydrogen, simply estab-
•
lishing
contact was a major feat. Getting intelligible information from them was
impossible.
Someday
humans will communicate by telepathy with each other, and alien races, as
easily as we now speak our various languages. But that day is so far distant
that it cannot be measured by years or generations or even centuries—it will
take millenia.
It
was toward the end of our second month in Morenia that Jeff met Tavia.
He
had put in a particularly trying morning, attempting to persuade the Morenian
leaders to call for a conference of all the star systems in the newly-conquered
area, of which Morenia was only one, for the purpose of discussing whether they
would join the Terrans in fighting the Masters.
The
Morenian leaders were polite and even friendly, but they completely evaded
giving Jeff a direct answer to his request.
"It's
like shadowboxing with a myth," Jeff said, shaking his head. He was still
sitting at the head of the long, polished conference table in one of the many
meeting rooms of his headquarters dome. The Morenians had all left.
"They
admit that we've defeated the Masters," he said, "and that we've
liberated their people. They say that they prefer us to the Masters, and thank
me for freeing them. Yet they just don't seem to understand what freedom means!
They don't seem to realize that they can do what they want without waiting for
the Masters to tell them what to do."
"They're afraid that the Masters will
return," I suggested.
Jeff snapped, "They won't if I can get
all the humans to stand together and fight."
"Give them time,"
I said. "Freedom is new to them."
Jeff
rose from his chair and stretched his tired body. "Time is what we have
the least of, I'm afraid."
We
walked together out of the conference chamber, downstairs and out along a
colonnaded pathway through a bright garden.
"This
is a lovely world," Jeff mused. "I hate to think of its people being
so afraid. .. ."
Just
then we both saw a girl standing at the end of the pathway.
She
was a small, slight young girl with golden hair falling to her shoulders and
wide brown eyes. She wore a loose-fitting white robe. Standing beside her was a
four-legged animal of some sort, about the size of a large Terran dog, but much
more thickly built.
She
walked toward us, with the animal padding heavily behind her.
"Are
you the leader of the Terrans?" she asked. Her voice was light and almost
trembling. Standing at her full height, she only rose up to Jeff's shoulder.
"Yes,"
Jeff answered seriously. "I'm Geoffrey Know-land. This is Alan Bakerman,
my friend."
A
fleeting smile. "I am Tavia, daughter of Loreno Tavar."
"One
of the leaders I was talking with this morning," Jeff said.
"Yes
. . . you speak our language quite well," she said.
"Thank
you. I was taught by one of your scholars, with the aid of your translating
machines."
She looked at Jeff, then at
me, but said nothing.
Jeff
was puzzled. "Is there something you wanted to talk to me about?"
She
nodded. "But I don't know if I have the courage to speak."
"Is it so
terrible?" he asked, laughing.
"I
have come . . ." she hesitated, then blurted out, "I have come to ask
you to spare our planet!"
"Spare it? From
what?"
"From
destruction! We know it is only a matter of time before you send your soldiers
to kill us all. I've heard my father and my uncle talking; they are afraid to
ask you for mercy, but someone must, because we have no troops to defend
ourselves and, and. . . ." She burst into tears.
"Destruction?"
Jeff echoed. "Kill you all? Who told you that?"
"It
... it is common knowledge," she
sobbed. "All over the planet your men and ships are waiting. Every day
they train themselves for battle . . . we have watched them practicing for our
slaughter."
"Practicing
for...." Jeff stopped, thunderstruck. He turned to me. "What's she
talking about?"
I
had a guess. "Perhaps she has watched your men exercising and playing
games in their off-duty hours."
Jeff's
jaw sagged open. "And she thinks. . .." He started laughing, and the
more he thought about it, the funnier it became. I had a hard time resisting
the temptation to join him.
The
girl choked down her sobs and looked up at him. "Is the thought of killing
us all so amusing to you?"
Jeff shook his head. "My dear
child...." Her chin went up. "I am not a child. And my name is
Tavia."
"All
right, all right... Tavia. My men
aren't practicing for slaughter. They're playing games, exercising. These men
have been cooped up for weeks in their ships ...
they're just flexing their muscles. Don't you have sports?"
She
wrinkled her nose in a sort of half-frown. "But, I saw with my own eyes .. . your men were knocking each other down
and throwing a horrible black bomb back and forth...."
That
stopped Jeff for a moment, then he realized what she was talking about.
"That," he said, "is an ancient Terran form of mayhem called
football. It's a sport."
"Really?" she asked in a small
voice.
"Come on," Jeff said, "and
I'll show you.
He
reached out his hand to her, but the beast beside her growled and bared a
formidable set of fangs.
"Edon!
Be quiet!" Tavia scolded. She turned back to Jeff. "My pet is overly
protective."
"I
don't blame him," Jeff said. "I would be, too, if I were entrusted to
guard you.... Would you like to see my ship? Probably some of the men are out
beside it right now, playing some Terran sport."
That
was how they met. For the next few weeks, Jeff devoted more and more of his
time to Tavia.
After
he had shown her that Terrans were at least not cannibals, she in turn began to
show him her planet and people.
Gradually, as Jeff met Tavia's family and
friends,
and
went with her to Morenian concerts, social gatherings, and theater
performances, the Morenians began to understand that the Terrans were not quite
the barbarians they had feared.
And
aside from winning the confidence of the political leaders, Jeff enjoyed being
with Tavia. For the first time since I had met him, I saw Jeff completely relaxed
and happy. It was almost as though he had forgotten the enemy waiting for him
out among the stars.
Time passed easily. The weeks melted into
months, and as each day added to the others with no avenging fleet from the
Masters sweeping down on us, the Morenians began to see there was some truth in
Jeff's arguments.
Although
nothing really exciting happened during those weeks, there were always the
nagging day-today administrative duties inherent in any organization the size
of Jeff's expeditionary force. So while we complained of the lack of things to
interest us, there was always plenty for us to do.
It
was during this time that Marsh sent a scout to investigate one of the
"reserved" planets which the Saurians had marked off limits both to
the Morenians and themselves.
The
scout reported an incredibly unhospitable world: its surface scoured clean down
to bare rock, orbiting so close to its giant blue sun that it had seas of
molten metals, and so radioactive that the scout scuttled back home as soon as
he heard the noise from his scintillation counters.
"And no sign of
life?" I asked Marsh.
He
shook his head. "Not even a blade of grass. They must have scoured the
planet clean after some battle."
"No,"
I said. "The Morenians say the planet was once inhabited by them, but the
Saurians moved the people off."
Marsh
puckered his roundish face into a scowl. "Why would the Masters turn an
Earth-like planet into a radioactive ball of bare rock?"
"The
scientists may be able to answer your questions," I said.
But
I was wrong. Not even the scientists could answer the riddle ... then.
After
more than three months of spearheading the Star Watch's liberation of captured
Confederation worlds, Terry's return to the expeditionary force hit Morenia
with the impact of a planet-wrecking meteor.
Backslapping,
laughing, booming, red-haired Terry uncorked months of pent-up emotions when he
rejoined us. He seemed to be all over the planet at once, and wherever the
giant Scandian went, the laughter and rejoicing of his news went with him: the
Confederation was now clear of invaders for the first time in more than ten
years.
Terry
had been in the thick of the fighting that overcame the Saurian invaders. And
he had been allowed the exquisite pleasure of leading the avenging troops back
to his native Scandia.
On
his jacket front he wore the golden sunburst of the Star Watch's heroism medal,
given to him personally by the Chief Coordinator. And around his right wrist
was the emerald-set bracelet of a Knight of Scandia, placed there by his
people's monarch at
To v/a
133
the
end of the final battle that ended the Saurians' occupation of his homeworld.
But
Terry also bore other reminders of the fighting he had been through. He was
noticeably leaner than I had remembered him to be, and there was a light scar
running across his left temple that even the Terran plastisurgeons could not
completely erase.
He
carried a sheaf of personal messages to Jeff from the Chief Coordinator, from
the Council, his friends, and his mother. Everyone realized that Jeff's
expeditionary force had been directly responsible for clearing the
Confederation of enemy forces. Terry summed up the reactions of the Confederation's
hundred-billion-odd population:
"We're
the biggest sis-boom-bah
heroes in the history of
mankind!"
After
several weeks, even Terry's endurance was worn down, and he settled into the
same routine as the rest of us: waiting. Waiting for Jeff to convince the
hesitant Morenians and other human races to join our forces; waiting for the
Masters to strike their counterblow.
One
evening Jeff, Terry and I had dinner together on a terrace projecting from the
side of the giant dome of the headquarters building. It was beautiful there at
sunset, with the big blue sun sinking to the horizon in a panorama of green and
violet splendor.
"No
. .. uh, politics . .. tonight?" Terry asked as we sat
down around the table.
Jeff laughed. "No.
She's busy tonight."
"Is Marsh going to
join us?" I asked.
Jeff
shook his head. "He's all wrapped up in mathematics. Seems that he's
stumbled onto some work the
Morenians
did on stellar gravitational fields...
they've built instruments that can detect the presence of a grav field in
subspace."
We were interested, but
hardly enthusiastic.
"Marsh
thinks he can use the Morenian data to identify gravitational spectra among the
stars," Jeff went on, "in subspace...
just as we identify visual spectra in normal space."
"You
mean he'd be able to tell one star from another in subspace?" Terry
asked.
Jeff
nodded. "The star's gravitational field leaks a little into subspace, and
Marsh is convinced he can work out a system that will allow us to identify any
star by its grav spectrum ... we'll
be able to navigate without ever coming out of subspace for navigational
checks!"
I began to understand. "This means that
there will be no limit on your speed in subspace, since you won't have to
decelerate to less than light-speed for navigational checks."
"Exactly," Jeff said. "We can
stay in subspace and accelerate all the way for as long as our engines hold
out. We could fly completely across the galaxy—a hundred thousand
light-years—or maybe someday even fly to another galaxy."
We
were all silent for a moment. Then Terry said, "Marsh stumbled onto this
in a Morenian study?"
"Yes.
Like all the races the Masters have conquered, the Morenians never developed a
superlight drive themselves. But they've done some physics and mathematics
work for the Saurians. Marsh found this in a mathematics report."
Terry shook his head. "I'll never be
able to understand a man who reads mathematics for relaxation." "It
takes all kinds to make a war," Jeff said, grinning. "Some war,"
Terry grumbled. "Huh?" ^
"This
isn't a war any more," Terry said, "it's a political campaign. The
Masters are out there with billions of troops, and we've been sitting here for
months doing nothing. I don't understand it."
Jeff
might have lost his temper if anyone else had said that. But with Terry he
merely smiled.
"Look,
old hothead ... I know just as well
as you how much work we have ahead of us, but there are more ways to fight an
enemy than by throwing rocks at him. We need the Morenians on our side."
Terry
squirmed in his seat. "But they still haven't agreed to help you...."
"Take
your time," Jeff advised. "The Masters will still be there next week.
Our scouts will let us know if they're massing for an attack. And from what the
Morenians have told me, there are millions of human star systems farther inside
the Masters' empire. If we can form a coalition of all these humans against the
Masters, if we can get them to join us as we liberate them ... then we've got the manpower to totally
defeat the Masters for all time."
"Well,
I still think," Terry said, toying with his spoon, "that if the
Morenians haven't seen the light by now, they never will."
"Give
them a chance," Jeff said. "They've been under the Masters' rule for
generations ... we've only been here
a few months. This idea of freedom to choose their own future is new to them.
And the thought of fighting the Masters just never occurred to them
before."
Terry
shook his head. "You're still trying to be a politician instead of a
military commander."
"What's wrong with
that?" Jeff asked.
"What do you
mean?"
"What's
so wrong about being a politician? How do you think we put the expeditionary
force together, in the first place? Have you forgotten the wheedling and
coaxing we had to go through?"
"Oh, that's
different," Terry said, "that's...."
"That
was politics, friend, pure and simple," Jeff insisted. "Look,
politics isn't just campaigning for election and making speeches. A
politician—if he's a good one—is a man who can get free men to work
together."
Terry looked puzzled.
Jeff
continued, "I can command this expeditionary force, and you and the rest
of the men are duty-bound to obey me. But I can't command the Morenians. If I
want them and the countless other human civilizations in the galaxy to work
with us, I have to be a politician."
"Well, maybe,"
Terry mumbled.
"I
know," Jeff said. "You don't normally think of a politician in that
light. But a good politician is a man who can get things done. The measure of
his worth is not how many elections he's won, but what he's added to his group:
what problems he's solved, what new ideas he's put across. They don't even have
to be his own original ideas—but putting them across to the public is the
politician's job."
Terry finally stopped arguing, either because
he saw what Jeff was driving at or he was tired, and we dialed for our meals.
The
food was blander than the usual Terran fare, but we had all become accustomed
to it. As the servo-robots trundled away with the last of the dishes, Jeff
leaned back and told us:
"We're going to take a
little trip tomorrow."
"Where?"
"Epsilon
Orionis."
"The
humanoids!" Terry's face broke into a grim smile.
"Take it easy," Jeff cautioned.
"We're going there to talk, not fight." "Talk? What about?"
Jeff
glanced at his wrist watch. "I'm expecting a call in a few minutes . .. let's go down to my office."
As
we left the terrace, Terry again asked, "What's there to talk about with
the humanoids?"
Jeff
looked at Terry for a long moment as we walked down the corridor leading to his
office.
Finally
he answered, "I want to see if they'll be willing to join us...."
"JOIN
US?" Terry exploded. "The same savages that wrecked Scandia? The
troops that wiped out half...."
"Hold
on," Jeff commanded. Terry stopped in mid-sentence, but his face was dark
with outrage.
"Our
scientists have been studying those humanoids for several months now from
orbit, and recently they've made successful landing expeditions. We know quite
a bit about them. They're professional warriors, serving the Masters."
Terry said nothing. We came to Jeff's office.
The door slid open as we approached, and the lights turned up inside the room
as we entered.
Jeff
sat on a couch near his desk. Terry and I took chairs.
"The
humanoids — they call themselves Komani — were once enemies of the Masters,
from what the anthropologists have found out. They originally lived in a
globular star cluster near the Masters' home cluster. Eons ago they fought a
gigantic war; the Masters couldn't beat them, even though they nearly wiped
them out."
Jeff
paused for a moment, then resumed. "To this day the Komani boast that they
are the only race the Masters never defeated. They're deluding themselves, of
course, because the Masters took them over completely . . . only they don't
realize it. The Komani devoted every ounce of their civilization to fighting
their war, and when the war was over, they had nothing left except a
generations-long tradition of fighting. So the Masters took what was left of
them, and made them the shock troops of their galactic empire.
"They've
done all the Masters' hardest fighting for thousands of generations now; the
entire race knows nothing except war. The Masters provided them with
transportation on Saurian ships, so the Komani have been completely dependent
on them. They don't have their own spaceships, and couldn't fly them if they
did."
Terry's
face was a thundercloud. "And you want to let them join us."
"Regardless
of how you feel, Terry, they're terrific fighters," Jeff said. "Their
entire race is on that planet. They travel in one unit. They have enough adult
males to match every fighting man we could throw against them; and if we
seriously tried to fight them, I don't think we'd win .. . the whole race would jump into it. We could try to wipe them
out from the ships. Or we could try to talk them into joining us."
Jeff
got up and walked to his scowling friend. "It's your decision to make,
Terry."
"Mine?"
"Yes,"
Jeff said. "If they come with us, they'll be under your command, since
they are strictly planetary fighters. And I won't take them unless you
agree."
"But I. ..."
"Think
about it. Sleep on it. Tomorrow we'll go to the Epsilon Orionis, either to
fight to the death with them or to take them in as allies."
Terry
stood up, looked around uncertainly, then headed for the door.
As
it slid open, he turned and asked, "Couldn't we just leave them on the
planet and forget about the whole thing?"
Jeff
smiled. "It would sort of be like leaving a man-eating animal in a cage,
wouldn't it?"
Terry
nodded unhappily and walked out. The door slid shut behind him.
Jeff
shook his head at me. "I know, it's a rough way to treat a friend, but we
can't let the Komani alone any longer. They're getting ready to kill
themselves, they're so edgy at being held prisoner on that planet."
I said nothing.
"Besides,"
Jeff went on, "Loreno Tavar thinks he can talk the other Morenian leaders
into calling a conference of all the human governments in this area for the
purpose of joining us against the Masters. But he thinks it would be better if
we were off the planet for a few days while he tries to convince them."
The
viewscreen on one side of the desk chimed softly. Jeff went to it and nicked it
on. Tavia's face appeared.
"Hello!" Jeff was
delighted.
But Tavia was frowning with
worry—or was it fear?
"Jeff,
my father and his brother, my uncle Tassilo, have just had a fearful argument
about your request for an all-human congress. Uncle Tassilo is violently
opposed to it. . . and you."
Jeff grinned. "I can
get along without your uncle."
"But
you don't understand," she said. "He hates you . . . and he hates my
father for supporting you."
"Well, I'm sorry to
cause trouble in your family. ..
."
"No,"
she said impatiently, "that's not it. Tassilo is a stubborn, ruthless
person when he's angry. He has sworn to do anything he can to stop you. . .
."
"So?"
"Jeff
. . . he'll try to discredit you, to humiliate you before our people. . .
."
"That can't hurt
me," Jeff said.
Tavia's
eyes were wide with fear. "Jeff, he may try to kill you!"
Chapter 7
Allies and Enemies
f Tavia's warning upset Jeff, he did not show it. The next morning we left
for Epsilon Orionis, as planned. Terry came along, and reluctantly agreed to
Jeff's plan of inviting the Komani to join us against the Masters.
When
we arrived at the main ship orbiting above die planet, we learned that the
Komani leaders had asked to talk to the Terran leader and his lieutenants. Face
to face.
"Smells
of a trap," Terry warned.
But
Jeff would have none of it. He even called Marsh away from his mathematics for
a quick flight to join us.
Jeff
was not afraid of the Komani, but he certainly wanted to impress them. He
insisted that we all wear full-dress uniforms. And side arms. I felt rather
silly in the stiff black and silver Star Watch tunic and tights with a heavy
Terran blaster strapped to my side. Terry
141
and Marsh looked quite impressive, though.
Terry even wore two blasters. But Jeff outdid us all.
He
wore a special uniform of blood red with black trim, high black boots and a
polished titanium helmet. He carried a blaster on his right hip and a captured
Komani broadsword on his left.
He even had a horse.
"I
thought they were extinct!" Marsh gulped when he saw it.
"They
are," Jeff answered, "in the Confederation. But Tavia told me that
they were native to a few systems here. We found them, and learned to ride
together."
He was all black, shiny,
and majestic.
"He's
a beautiful animal," Terry said. "What's his name?"
"Bucephelas,"
Jeff said. "I named him after the favorite horse of an ancient Terran
conqueror."
The
time came for us to start planetward, and we boarded the landing ship. The
pilot landed us on the plateau close to the twisted wreckage of what was once a
spaceport. The sky was just beginning to turn pale with dawn.
We
left the ship, Jeff on horseback, the rest of us afoot, while the crew stayed
aboard at battle stations, just in case.
For several minutes nothing
happened.
Then
we saw a flickering glow on the horizon. It gradually drew closer, resolved
itself into three distinct lights, then stopped and remained stationary. By
now the sun was edging over the horizon behind us, and the sky was a bright
yellow-green in color.
"I guess they've come halfway across the
plateau,** Jeff said finally, "and they're waiting for us to meet
them."
So
we left the ship and started across the grassy flatland. No one spoke, and I
imagine we all looked rather grim. Especially, since we were carrying enough
firepower to wipe out a good-sized battalion of troops.
And
then we saw them—stretched out across the plateau to the horizon, thousands of
Komani warriors, all dressed in bright body armor, many astride their one-man
fliers, all carrying swords and guns. The lights we had seen were gigantic
ceremonial beacon fires, which they had mounted on tracked vehicles.
They
were formed in a giant semicircle, with lances and pennants marking off
divisions of men at regular intervals.
At
the center of this great living arch was a gleaming plastic bubble. Standing
before it were the brightest and most richly-dressed Komani: the tribe's chieftains.
Evidently
Jeff had his psychology correctly figured. A noticeable stir went through their
ranks as we approached. Even a few of the chiefs standing directly before us
turned to each other for a hurriedly-whispered interchange.
Jeff stopped his horse a
few paces in front of them.
"I
am Geoffrey Knowland, a commander in the Terran Confederation Star Watch and
leader of the Terran Expeditionary Force. These are my lieutenants: Sir
Terrance Radnor of Scandia, Chief Technical Officer Marshall Jordan, and
Special Adjutant Ahgh'-loun B'krhom'mnin, of Rh'khour'mnin."
It was the first time I had
ever heard Jeff attempt to speak words of my native tongue. He did fairly well
for a Terran. I learned later that he had practiced it with Tavia for months.
The tallest of the Komani
stepped forward.
"I
am Tamar Kang, chief of the Komani." Both he and Jeff had spoken in the
Morenian tongue.
Tamar
Kang was a picture of savage strength. He was taller and wider even than Terry,
and his skintight uniform showed every bulge of muscle. He wore no armour, but
had a huge sword buckled to his waist.
He
gave me the impression of a jungle beast of prey: velvet-sheathed claws and
ferocious cunning. The pupils of his eyes were fierce narrow slits, like a
cat's in daylight. He had powerful sloping shoulders and broad, strong hands.
He had no hair to speak of, but his face and the backs of his hands were
covered with a light greenish downy fuzz. His ears were flat against his skull.
On
a closer inspection, I saw that his lips covered all his teeth, but he
certainly looked as though he ought to have fangs.
We
discussed no politics that whole day. Tamar Kang insisted on entertaining us;
we were his guests, he said, and the whole Komani race would honor us. They led
us down off the plateau to a grassy valley where the rest of the tribe was
encamped in a mammoth circle of collapsible plastic bubble-tents.
The
people were polite, yet reserved; we were the guests of their chief, but we
were strangers. They stood by as we went through the encampment, tall, strong,
proud, and silent, following us with their unblinking yellow cat's eyes.
They made no move to hinder us, and the
guides which Tamar Kang had given us carefully showed us everything we
expressed an interest in. But I sensed a tenseness, a feline nervousness, just
beneath their quiet, grave manner. They seemed inwardly coiled and ready to
spring ... or was it only that we
were nervous at being so completely engulfed by them?
Jeff
was keenly interested in seeing how the Komani lived, even though he already
seemed to know much about them from the observations of the scientists.
Marsh
and even Terry were impressed by the firm dignity and openhanded treatment we
were receiving. We were shown through much of the encampment, from family-sized
bubble-tents to the large, ornate council tent—another bubble but much bigger
and fancier.
What
impressed me most about the Komani was their singleness of purpose. Their
children had no toys except plastic swords and miniature replicas of guns;
their art was confined to decorative metalwork for their weapons and armor;
their music consisted almost entirely of battle sagas.
They
were fighters and nothing else, roaming the galaxy, at the will of the Masters,
in ships that the Saurians furnished; they knew no other life and had known
none other for countless ages.
It
seemed to me that the Komani had evolved from a feline race—much as the Terrans
had branched off from a type of four-legged, ground-dwelling monkey, and my own
people had arisen from a small, fuzzy mammal, very much like a miniature Terran
bear.
I asked some of the Komani elders we met that
day about their racial origins, but their answers were all vague and cloaked in
mythology. Either they considered a stranger's questions impertinent, or they
had actually never stopped to scientifically examine their own racial
background.
I
suspected the latter. Since their alliance with the Masters, the Komani had had
no need to develop any science beyond the rudimentary engineering of
planet-bound warfare. Nor would the Masters allow them to, if they showed an
interest in science, I believe.
That
night we were escorted to the council tent by a guard of honor, and treated to
some wild feasting and celebrating. It was very late when we were finally shown
to our sleeping quarters — a small but well-appointed bubble-tent. The four of
us took turns on watch while the other three slept.
Early
the next morning—too early—we were summoned to Tamar Kang's council tent. This
time the full Komani council of chieftains was sitting in formal session.
We
were shown to low-slung benches on one side of a long, curving table; the
council members were all on the other side. Jeff was placed opposite Tamar
Kang, of course. The table, built by the Komani for their own use, was at an
awkward height for us, except for Terry, who was as tall as most of the Komani.
The
council's eldest members began the session by reciting long, intricate, formal
histories of the race's deeds in battle. They took turns, going down the table,
each man chanting about a particular battle.
When
it began to look as though this would go on all day, Tamar Kang raised his
hand.
"Enough," he said. "There is
no need to weary our guests further with formalities."
"Not
at all," Jeff protested, and I think he meant it. "I find your sagas
most interesting."
"There
will be time enough for songs and histories later," Kang rumbled. "We
have matters to discuss today that pertain to today . . . and tomorrow."
"Quite true,"
Jeff said, nodding.
Tamar
Kang stared down at Jeff. Finally, he said, "You have held my people
prisoner on this planet for many months. Why?"
"First,
because we didn't want you to fight against us while we were destroying the
Saurian fleets. . . ."
An audible gasp went
through the council.
Jeff
smiled. "Yes, we destroyed them: the fleet from Rigel was badly mauled,
the fleet from inside the Terran Confederation was completely wiped out, and
the fleet from Delta Orionis—which was supposed to be your transportation, I
understand—turned and fled from us."
The council members murmured to one another.
"You say the Saurians fled from you?" Tamar Kang asked stiffly.
"Yes,"
Jeff said. "We had destroyed the spaceports on this planet in the hopes of
keeping you grounded and out of the fight. But the Saurian fleet could have
landed here at any time. Instead, they ran away."
The
murmuring stopped. The bubble-tent was absolutely silent.
"If
you were victorious over the Saurians," Kang asked craftily, "why did
you not come to do battle with us?"
Jeff took the question good-naturedly.
"I was curious about you," he answered, smiling. "I wanted to know why human beings were serving
the Masters, and depending on Saurians who would run away and leave you
prisoners."
Jeff
had not missed the bitterness they showed when they learned that they had been
deserted by the Saurians. He was playing this advantage to the hilt.
"We
serve no one," Tamar Kang said evenly. "We have an alliance with the
Masters: we fight for them in return for transportation and spoils."
"Oh?"
Jeff asked, with a carefully-modulated incredulity. "Then where are the
ships they promised you? Where are your spoils? You fought hard and well at
Scandia, yet I understand you took no spoils there."
Tamar
Kang's face clouded over. "We were asked to leave Scandia immediately
after the final battle was successfully concluded. Instead of spoils from that
planet, the Masters rewarded us in many other ways."
I glimpsed at Terry's face:
a grim white mask.
"I
can see that," Jeff said, almost insolently. "And as soon as they got
into trouble, the Masters decided to allow you to become prisoners rather than
risk any of their ships for you."
Tamar
Kang stiffened visibly, and the other council members muttered among
themselves.
"I
notice you are wearing a Komani sword," Tamar Kang shifted the subject.
"I
took it from one of your warriors on Scandia," Jeff said.
"He was dead?"
"Yes. I killed
him."
Another silence. Tamar Kang's eyes were
glowing hotly.
Then
Jeff rose to his feet. "I
think we've talked long enough.
It is clear that we are equals—Komani and Terrans—indeed, all humans everywhere
in the galaxy. If we fight each other, we are obeying the wishes of the
Masters. When we kill each other, we hurt no one but ourselves.
"You
have fought nobly for the Masters, and your reward has been to be left behind
as prisoners. Is this a warrior's fate?"
"No!" some of the
Komani shouted.
"Tamar
Kang, I offer you a bargain: Join with me. Fight against the Masters and the
Saurians who have betrayed you. Together with the other human races, we can
defeat the Masters and rule the galaxy.
"I
know the risks are great. Defeat is possible, death a certainty. But would you
rather die prisoners or free men? Would you prefer to be exterminated here or
to fight?"
The council was in a hubbub
of excitement.
Tamar
Kang raised his hand and they were instantly quiet. "Under what terms do
you expect us to join you?" he asked.
"I
want you to consider yourselves as part of the army of humankind. No special
terms, no special privileges."
"And spoils?"
"You
will receive the same pay, same equipment and transportation, and the same
rewards as any other part of the army."
Kang glanced at the other council members on
either side of him.
"What you ask is of a very grave
nature," he said slowly. "The council must discuss this matter at
some length."
"Certainly," Jeff
agreed.
We
were escorted from the council tent back to our quarters, with a small squad of
Komani youngsters tagging along, watching us curiously.
Back
in our bubble-tent, Jeff asked me, "What do you think?"
"You
have offered them their lives in exchange for their allegiance," I said.
"They will accept."
It
was nearly dark before we learned the council's decision.
We
were sitting in the bubble-tent, Jeff and Marsh trying to play a Komani version
of tri-di chess, Terry lying quietly in his bunk.
Suddenly
the door slid back and Tamar Kang's bulky frame ducked through it.
Jeff
stood up. Without a word, Kang took a large gold medallion and chain from
around his neck and placed it over Jeff's shoulders. Then he grasped both of
Jeff's hands in his own mighty fists and said simply:
"We
will be ready by sunrise to follow you anywhere in the galaxy."
He left.
Jeff stood there, staring
at the now-closed door.
"Well, it's
done," he said at last.
Terry
swung up from his bunk. "I hope you know what you're doing."
"There's
an old Terran saying," Marsh observed, "about grabbing a tiger by the
tail. You'd better keep a good firm grip on him, Jeff."
We remained at the Komani encampment for a
few days more, while Jeff summoned groups of his scientists and administrators
to work out the details of fitting the new warriors into the Terran
Expeditionary Force.
It
turned out that the Komani, who once fought a life-and-death struggle with the
Masters, no longer knew where the Masters' homeworlds were. A globular cluster
of stars near the center of the galaxy—that much they had retained in their old
battle sagas. But which of the hundreds of gigantic clusters of ten thousand
or more stars? This information had evidently been blocked out by the Masters.
During
this time Jeff attempted to make a personal friend of Tamar Kang. It was hard
to tell whether or not he made any headway with the giant, unsmiling warrior
chief.
At
any rate, in the midst of this new bustle of activity, we received word from
Loreno Tavar that the Morenian leaders had agreed to call a congress of all the
human governments in the area under Jeff's control.
We
flew back to Morenia just in time for the opening of the Congress of
Humankind.
If Jeff had tried his hardest to impress the
Komani with his warlike prowess, he attempted with equal vigor to show the
humans at the Congress that he was civilized.
The
Congress convened at one of the big meeting domes spotted across the Morenian
countryside. To our surprise, the response to Morenia's call was overwhelmingly
greater than anyone had expected. Every star system in the area sent not only a
representative, but teams of men—most of them important leaders in their home
governments. They were all curious to see the Terran youth who had
outmaneuvered and outfought the invincible servants of the Masters.
The
group—some thousands in number—met for the first formal session outside a huge
meeting-dome. It was a typical Morenian morning: bright, clear, warm, with a
slight breeze swaying the trees and shrubs around the glass and metal dome.
The
men stood in a vast group before the main entrance of the dome, a shifting,
intermixing mass of variegated costumes, colors, tongues, customs, physical
shapes and sizes—all human, all basically the same pattern, but each single
person different, individual.
They
were excited. Never before in the memory of any of them, or even in their
histories, had they come together for a meeting such as this. Under the
Masters, they had been kept separated, each culture remaining in its own little
sphere, following its own laws and customs, ruled by the watchful Saurians and
the never seen, but always felt and obeyed, Masters.
Finally,
when the group was fully assembled, and even the latecomers had joined the
crowd, Loreno Tavar and Jeff walked out from the dome's main entrance and
stood before them.
Jeff
was dressed in a severely simple uniform of white with gold trim. He bore no
weapons, carried no decorations. His head was bare, and his short-cropped dark
hair was in startling contrast to the predominantly light-haired men around
him.
We
all wore Morenian translators: an electronic combination of computer and
amplifier which could instantly translate any of the languages spoken by the
assembled group.
Loreno
Tavar spoke first. He simply introduced Jeff as the leader of the Terrans, and
said that he would explain the purpose of the Congress.
As
he turned to Jeff, it seemed that the whole planet grew still and listened.
Even the breeze slacked off.
"My
purpose in asking you to come here is quite simple," Jeff said, with no
preliminaries. "The Terran Expeditionary Force has cleared this area of
Saurians. You are, for the moment, free of the Masters. I want you to consider
what you will do with your freedom."
He
went on to elaborate, explaining the events that had led up to this moment,
telling them what he knew of the history of the Masters and how they had attacked
the Terran Confederation.
"I
know that, to you, we Terrans seem strange and even primitive. We have much to
learn from you, that is true. But we have learned one fact that I want to
impress on you:
"Freedom
is not maintained by wishful thinking. The Masters will attempt to reclaim this
area. When they do, I will need your help to defeat them. And you will need my
help if you wish to remain free."
"You
speak of freedom," a young man in the front of the crowd called out.
"What do you mean by it?" He was a good-looking youth, about Jeff's
size and age; copper hair, pleasant face, and, judging by his robes, a
Morenian.
"By
freedom," Jeff answered, "I mean the ability to do, to think, to act
as you please . . . without asking permission of the Saurians, or wondering
what the Masters expect of you."
"Then an animal in the
forest is free."
Jeff
smiled. "Yes, until a larger animal kills him. As for men, their freedom
is based on mutual trust, and mutual help. A free man's only limit is the
consideration of his fellow men. And for a man to remain free, he and his
fellow men must be strong enough to resist those who would enslave him."
Marsh,
Terry, and I had been standing off to one side of the crowd with a group of
Morenians and other Terrans during this interchange.
"Who is that
guy?" Terry asked.
"Dardus,"
one of the Morenians said. "The son of Tassilo, and nephew of Loreno
Tavar."
The
son of Tassilo, I thought, remembering Tavia's warning to Jeff.
Jeff
talked and answered questions for most of the morning. Then the group broke up
for smaller conferences inside the dome. There were too many men to sit in a
single group, even in the dome's main meeting room, so they spread through the
many meeting rooms for conferences and a midday meal.
Jeff
and most of his staff made the rounds of these smaller conferences, answering
questions, discussing ideas.
I
accompanied Jeff most of the time. He hammered away on his basic theme: humans
must be free to decide their own fate, and to do this the Masters must be
defeated by an army of united humankind.
Repeatedly,
they wanted to know what the advantages of freedom would be. Many insisted
that they had all die freedom they could use under the Masters.
"And
your people's birth rate ... is it
going up or down?" Jeff would ask.
Static, was the answer. Static for tens of
centuries, or perhaps a slight downward trend.
"And
what new inventions or discoveries have your scientists and technicians made
recently?"
After
much hemming and hawing, the answer was almost always: none. Or at best,
something so inconsequential that it could be better described as a slight
development of an old invention.
"Have
you learned anything or done anything that your father did not know or
do?"
Again,
when the basic facts were uncovered: no, not much.
"And
you say the Masters have allowed you all the freedom you need," Jeff
scathed. "You have been allowed the freedom to stagnate, to wither up, to
die. The Masters must reckon time by millenia...
by revolutions of the galaxy, instead of our paltry planetary revolutions. How
many revolutions of the galaxy do you expect your race to remain alive, at the
rate you're now going?"
And
to another group he pleaded, "Don't you see? The Masters have taken the
growth out of you. How can you talk about being allowed certain amounts of
freedom? A man is free because he has the brains and the courage to stand on
his feet and go his own way, both as an individual and as the member of a
group. When you are allowed only certain amounts of freedom, you're not
free—you're on a leash, and you've tied the knot around your necks
yourselves!"
It
was not until late that afternoon that the trouble occurred.
Jeff was in the main conference room, locked
in intent conversation with a group of men from Betelgeuse, when Dardus
entered, accompanied by an older man who looked so much like him that I assumed
him to be Tassilo.
Dardus
was smiling, but he seemed tense, and the smile forced. He made his way across
the big room slowly, chatting briefly with knots of men, nodding to others, but
always edging toward Jeff.
I
excused myself from the group I was with and made my way to Jeff also.
I got there just as Dardus
and his father did.
Jeff turned to them as they
joined the group.
"The
man who wants to know what freedom is," he said, smiling.
Dardus
replied crisply, "The Terran who knows the answers to all things."
"Not
everything," Jeff said, "For instance, I don't know your name."
"I
am Dardus of Morenia," the youth said. "This is my father,
Tassilo."
"Oh,
yes," Jeff said, and I saw recognition on his face. "You are Loreno
Tavar's brother. He has spoken of you often."
Tassilo's
fingers fiddled with his robe. "My brother and I do not always take the
same side of an argument. As he has probably told you, I am opposed to your
plan for turning Morenia into a battleground."
Jeff's
eyes flashed, but he instantly regained his poise. "Your brother didn't
mention your opposition," he said truthfully. "As for turning Morenia
into a battleground, if I can raise enough ships and men, I propose to fight my
battles far from here ... as close to
the Masters' homeworlds as I can."
"Do you really think you can defeat the
Masters?" Dardus asked sharply.
"I already have,"
Jeff said.
"One battle does not
make a war,"
"No.
But winning one battle is better than losing it. I think we've shown that
Terrans can defeat Saurians when the odds are reasonable."
Dardus,
smiling nervously, retorted, "I think all you have proved is that you have
had uncommon luck. And you know as well as I that the Masters will crush you
whenever they choose to."
Jeff
looked around the room ingenuously. "I've been here six months. Where are
they? What are they waiting for?"
Tassilo
made a noise in his throat. "You are living on borrowed time. And you are
trying to take us down to destruction with you."
Jeff
locked his gaze on Tassilo's grayish eyes. "Don't think for an instant
that I'm such a fool. If I really thought I had no chance to beat the Masters,
I wouldn't be standing here talking politics ...
I'd be fortifying a hiding place for myself and my men."
"But
that is the way a civilized man would behave," Dardus said. "No one
expects a Terran barbarian to act intelligently."
Jeff
held on to his temper, but just barely. "If it is an act of barbarism to
resist the Masters, then I am a barbarian—and glad of it. I would rather be
such a barbarian than to go through life without the intelligence to realize
that I am a slave and that my race is dying before my eyes."
"You prove your own ignorance,"
Dardus snapped.
"I am ignorant on only one point
here," Jeff said. "I don't know what the Masters have promised you to
make you try to block my plans."
"You accuse me of
treachery?" Dardus shouted.
"Either you or your
father . . . perhaps both."
"That's
grounds for a duel!" Dardus said, whisking a small, slim rod from beneath
his robe.
"That's
fine by me," Jeff answered. "Where and when?"
"Here and now,"
Dardus said.
Before
I could say anything, Dardus, Tassilo, Jeff, and a few other Morenians and
Terrans were striding from the room, heading for the meadow outside the dome.
I
ran to Jeff's side, and had to scamper to keep pace with him. His face was a
dark cloud.
"You
can't!" I pleaded. "Whether you win or lose this duel, your behavior
will prove to the Morenians and the other humans that you are an uncivilized
brawler. If you kill Dardus, all Morenia will turn against you."
"Maybe he'll kill
me," Jeff said.
"That
is extremely probable," I said, somewhat breathlessly, trying to keep up
with him and talk at the same time. "Do you have any idea of what that
weapon he was toying with could be?"
"It's
a Morenian side arm," Jeff said, as we went through the main doorway and
outside. "Uses electromagnetic beams to disrupt the nervous system."
"Have you ever fired
one?"
"No."
"Do you know how to use it at all?"
"No."
"Then he will kill
you!"
The
group was walking around the dome now, toward the back. We had attracted quite
a crowd already. I saw several members of Jeff's staff, including Terry. Loreno
Tavar was rushing toward us.
"Certainly
he'll kill me," Jeff said, "if we use his weapons. But I'm the one
who was challenged. Right?"
I
was relieved to see that Jeff had not taken complete leave of his senses. But
all this meant was that, at best, Jeff would be considered a barbarian and murderer;
his hope for an army of humankind to battle the Masters would be killed at the
instant he killed Dardus.
Jeff stopped and called to Dardus. "This
looks like a good place." "Fine."
"Since
you challenged me, I believe I have the choice of weapons."
Dardus'
face fell as Jeff beckoned to a Star Watch officer. "Go to my quarters and
get a couple of dueling swords, please."
We
had to wait almost half an hour while the officer antigrav'd to Jeff's quarters
and back.
Loreno Tavar joined us.
"I beg you to stop this."
"How?"
Jeff asked. "It's just as Tavia said. Tassilo has me in a spot where he
can either discredit me or kill me. If you don't mind, I'd rather save my skin
first and worry about my reputation later."
"But you will have to
kill Dardus!"
"He's
offered to do as much for me," Jeff answered without humor.
"But
you don't understand. He knows nothing of politics. My brother has put him up
to this. . . ."
"He's old enough to
know what he's doing."
Loreno
Tavar gripped Jeff's shoulder. "Listen to me. Dardus is only old enough to
know that Tavia is more interested in you than in him."
Jeff was stunned. "You
mean that he's. . . ."
"He's
been betrothed to Tavia since childhood. And he loves her."
"And she?"
"She
accepted the fact that one day she would marry him . . . until she met
you."
Jeff
looked past Loreno Tavar at Dardus. "I'm not very familiar with your
customs," he said. "How binding is this betrothal?"
"It
is binding only if both parties are willing to be bound by it," Loreno
Tavar answered. "But I beg you to stop and consider. He is my nephew, and
dear to me. I know his deadi will weigh heavily on me . .. and on Tavia, too."
Jeff
said nothing. Soon the officer returned with the swords.
"You
know of fencing on Morenia," Jeff said to Dardus as he gave him his choice
of the swords.
"For
sport," Tassilo spat out. "Only a barbarian would consider them as
weapons."
Jeff
looked at him. "They'll kill you just as dead as an electromagnetic
beam."
He
turned on his heel and walked away. By now, most of the representatives had
left their conferences and joined the throng outside to watch the duel. Dardus
dropped his robe and faced Jeff in tunic and shorts. Jeff loosened his collar
and saluted with his blade.
There were no referees and no formal seconds
. . .
the
two opponents merely stepped up to one another, crossed swords, and began.
Dardus
began cautiously, testing Jeff's reflexes with a series of feints and short
thrusts. Jeff sat in a fencer's crouch and parried, slowly giving ground.
Dardus' probing gradually grew sharper and more intense, until he was pressing
a real attack. Jeff still backed away, content to parry with only an occasional
counterthrust.
This
went on for several minutes, with Dardus' attack growing steadily more furious
until it seemed he would push Jeff right into the curving wall of the dome.
But
a foot or so short of the wall, Jeff suddenly stopped retreating. At first no
one realized it, but Jeff merely stood his ground, parrying every slashing
drive that Dardus aimed at him. Finally, it became apparent that the Morenian
could not penetrate Jeff's guard . . . even Dardus himself began to see it, and
the exultant light in his eyes began to fade.
Then
Jeff's blade flicked in almost faster than you could see, and Dardus' tunic was
ripped open. He began to back away from the Terran. Jeff followed, catlike. He
lunged again, and this time Dardus' left shoulder began to trickle blood.
They
stood for a moment, both of them unmoving, facing each other in their
half-squatting fencer's poses.
A
lightening flash, and Dardus' blade was slapped out of his hands.
The
crowd was silent. Beyond Dardus' form, Jeff saw Tassilo and his brother, both
ashen-faced.
"Pick it up,"
Jeff said.
Dardus
retrieved his sword, and Jeff began stalking him again. The Morenian gave
ground steadily as
Jeff
flicked in and out of his guard, easily parrying his attempts to counterattack.
It
was evident that Jeff was complete master of the situation, that he could kill
Dardus at any moment. Yet he played with him, cat-and-mouse.
Then,
suddenly, Jeff mounted a furious attack that drove Dardus off-balance and sent
him sprawling at his father's feet.
Jeff
slammed his booted foot on the Morenian's blade.
He
looked at Tassilo. "I know that this boy is fighting me because you want
him to. I only wish you were young enough to face me, yourself." He turned
back to Dardus, who had risen to one knee. "As for Tavia, it's for her to
decide who she loves, not for us to decide for her by trying to kill one
another."
Dardus
rose to his feet. He was sweaty and covered with grime where he had fallen.
"I challenged you to fight," he said, shakily. "Give me my sword
back and we'll finish this. I'm not asking to be excused."
Jeff
handed Dardus his own sword. "I don't want your life," he said.
"But I could use your courage and your good right arm. Will you join
me?"
Dardus
stared at Jeff for a long moment, turned to his father, then dropped the sword
and ran through the crowd into the dome.
The Congress lasted three days more. In the
end, Jeff got what he wanted. The representatives voted to raise an army and
join the Terrans in the fight against the Masters. Jeff had his army of
humankind.
More, in fact. Because on the last day of the
Congress, Tassilo and Dardus appeared before Jeff. Tas-silo said:
"I
still disagree with you, and believe that your plans will lead to nothing but
ruin for all of us. But you have spared my son when you could have easily
killed him. I must thank you for that, and apologize for
deliberately provoking the duel between you."
Jeff
answered, "I respect your opinion, and your honesty. No apology is
necessary. As for you," he said to Dardus, "I meant what I said two days ago. Will you join
me?"
"I
have already accepted a commission in the More-nian fleet," Dardus said.
The
two of them—Jeff and Dardus—talked for about an hour after that. If they
mentioned Tavia at all, I do not know, for I was busy with my own duties at the
time.
But
that evening, Jeff and Tavia met again . . . for the last time, as it turned
out.
They
must have felt that there would be little time left to them. They sat on a
balcony of the dome that was Jeff's headquarters, and talked for hours. It was
nearly dawn when they finally parted. They had many things to say to each other
... so many things to say, and so
little time to say them.
The
next morning we received the ultimatum from the Masters.
Chapter S B°»/e f°r ufe
the Masters' ultimatum was delivered by a Saurian I admiral, in person.
|
The very day the Congress of Humankind broke I up, we received word that the Saurian had piloted a one-man scoutship
into the Terran patrols near the star, Spica. He claimed a truce, saying he had
a message that could be delivered only to the commander of the Terran forces.
It
was only many days afterward that any of us realized that, legally, the Saurian
should have spoken to the Chief Coordinator of the Star Watch, or perhaps even
the President of the Confederation Council.
We
all assumed, when the Saurian asked for the Terran leader, that he was
referring to Jeff. This is perhaps not important in itself, but it shows how
our viewpoint was becoming detached from the confines of the Confederation and
projected into a larger arena.
Jeff, Terry, and I flew immediately to the
cruiser
164
where
the Saurian was being held. Marsh declined to come. He was still deep in his
mathematical work on the new subspace navigational system.
He was the biggest Saurian I had ever seen,
and even the cocky Terran crew of the patrol cruiser dubbed him a
"dragon" instead of the usual "lizard."
Like
all the Saurians, he rested on two heavy hind limbs and a supporting tail. His
forelimbs were short and weak-looking, but ended in clawed hands. He wore an
arm band indicating his rank, and a curious pendant on his chest.
Unlike
the other Saurians I had known, he was fully as tall as any Terran, and no
doubt weighed much more. His scales were a brilliant mixture of blues and
yellows. His head was much smaller and not nearly as toothy as other Saurians'.
"We've
tried to communicate with him," the captain of the cruiser told Jeff,
"but he refuses to talk to anyone but the commander of the Terrans."
We
were all standing on the bridge of the patrol cruiser, observing the
Saurian—who was locked in an empty cargo compartment—over the ship's intercom
system.
"Well,"
Jeff said, watching the unmoving reptile, "he's either come to surrender,
or advise us to surrender. Let's see which."
The
three of us, accompanied by the captain and a well-armed squad of guards, went
to the compartment.
The
Saurian stared unblinkingly at us as Jeff introduced himself, Terry, and me.
He spoke Terran. The Saurian seemed to understand.
"Then you are in command of the
Terrans?" His mouth did not move. The words—metallic, machinelike—came
from the square pendant hanging from his neck.
Jeff
said he was. The Saurian took a moment to digest this, then asked:
"This person at your side is
Rh'khour'mnin?"
"I am," I answered, "and I
have joined the Terrans."
We
can always afford to lose a slave, he suddenly switched to telepathy. However, it is fortunate that you are
present. The translating machine is slow and inexact. You will translate for
me.
"Is he communicating to you?" Jeff
asked.
"Yes,"
I replied without taking my eyes from the Saurian. "He wants me to translate
between you."
"Can you?"
"Yes."
"It isn't too much of a strain?" "Not if he
cooperates," I said. What is your purpose in coming here? I asked the Saurian.
I
have a message for the Terran leader. I told Jeff. He nodded to proceed. What is your message?
The Saurian stirred slightly, then closed his
eyes and delivered his message:
From
the Masters of the galaxy, rulers of the stars for countless ages,
acknowledged leaders of all intelligent
beings: Greetings to the men of
Earth.
In
recent times you have chosen to resist our gifts
of civilization and peace in preference to living in your own benighted
fashion among your poor scattered stars. You have even attempted to convince
your neighbars,
who have long been our faithful subjects, to join you in a war against us.
We have no desire to annihilate you, and
since you are so violently opposed to our proffered friendship, tve deign to
leave you in peace to live as you please. All the star systems you have
conquered may remain under your rule. We are not so poor, nor so vainglorious,
as to desire your meager worlds at the cost of
further bloodshed.
However, should you refuse this offer of peace and attempt to continue the war,
know that your fleets shall be decimated wherever they appear and your
homeworlds shall feel the full weight of
the mightiest armies in the galaxy.
We can utterly destroy you at any time, but
we offer you the freedom you so rabidly desire—even at the cost of learning the benefits of an older, wiser civilization.
The choice is yours: Peace or destruction.
There
was a long silence after I finished translating the Saurian's message.
Terry
was the first to break it. "Nice of them to admit we're at war. 'Gifts of
civilization!'" He snorted. "First time I've ever heard an invasion
called a gift."
Jeff
was staring at the Saurian, but his mind was obviously racing far and fast.
"Jeff,"
I said. "Do you realize what the Masters are offering you?"
"I think so."
"They
are asking to call off the war. They are suing for peace. . . ."
"At the status
quo," he said.
"Yes," I replied. "You can
keep a territory a thousand light-years in diameter . . . five times the size
of the Terran Confederation!"
"It's not
enough," Jeff muttered.
"Not
enough? Jeff, think a moment. This area has never known a single, unified
government. If you can assure them that they can live in peace, without fear of
the Masters' reprisals, Morenia and all the other human systems will make you
their leader. You can be an emperor! The Terran Confederation will make you
Star Watch Chief Coordinator at least. . . perhaps Council President . .
."
Jeff
shook his head. "I know all that, old friend. And don't think it's not a
tempting proposition. But remember why we're fighting the Masters."
I stopped a moment.
"Do
you think that even the present area we control is big enough to keep from
being digested by the Masters? Remember, Alan . . . warfare is only one of
their methods. They won most of this area centuries ago, without firing a shot.
You, yourself, pointed out to me that they can win the Confederation without a
war ... it would only be a question
of time."
"Yes,
of course," I said, realizing what I had known all along, but forgotten in
the excitement of the Saurian's offer.
"No,"
Jeff said, "if we settled for the area we've won now, the Masters would
absorb us all in a few generations. And besides, I can't agree to place a limit
on Terran expansion. We humans are an odd type, Alan ... we must
expand . . . dynamic stability
is built into our culture. If we stop expanding, we turn into passive lotus
eaters, like the Morenians and the others."
Like my own people, I
thought to myself.
"We
can't make peace with the Masters until we can face them as equals .. . until we have broken dieir power and
are strong enough to digest their culture without being absorbed into it
against our will," Jeff said. "Tell him that."
There is no need, the Saurian projected. I understand you. You have chosen to die.
The
expeditionary force left Morenia in battle formation the next day.
"The
Saurian's ultimatum means two things," Jeff told us, when we met on the
bridge of his cruiser as the fleet got under way. "First, they're
assembling a force that'll overpower us by sheer numbers. Second, they haven't
completely put it together yet. They're daring us to fight, but I don't think
they're ready yet."
"They've
had six months to get ready," Terry pointed out, slouching in his chair.
"I
know. But consider their communications problem . . . they're trying to put
together fleets from all over the galaxy, distances involving tens of thousands
of light-years. Six months is barely enough time to get started."
"You hope," Marsh
kidded.
"Let's all hope,"
Jeff grinned back.
He
swiveled his seat and punched a button on the bridge's communications console;
his galaxy map appeared on the viewscreen.
We
saw the small white patch of the Terran Confederation set off to one side of a
larger, almost circular area—the area the expeditionary force now controlled.
All of these stars were part of a broad spiral arm that extended from the
central nucleus of the galaxy and swept far out beyond the Confederation, one
of three such arms.
"You
can see," Jeff said, "that we're sailing down the Orion arm of the
galaxy, going toward the central hub, more than twenty-five thousand
light-years away. This is all new territory to us, but not to the
Masters."
Marsh
nodded vigorously. "The astronomers are bursting blood vessels with joy .
. . gillions of new stars to map and investigate. They've sneaked so much
equipment onto some of our scoutships that I've considered telling the scouts
to save ammunition when they meet the enemy and just throw spectrometers at
'em."
"Never
mind," Jeff laughed. "We need all die astronomical information we
can get, if we hope to navigate through this area."
"Why
don't we try a few raids to see if we can pick up enemy star charts?"
Terry suggested.
"Good
idea," Jeff agreed. "At any rate, we're going to have to do a lot
more than try a few raids. As I said, we'll soon be in hostile territory, and a
trap might be sprung on us at any time or place. So, as we go cruising along,
we mustn't leave a single enemy base intact behind us. I want a clear line of
retreat open at all times."
"That's going to be a
big order," Terry said.
"I
know. But I think if we repeat the raiding tactics we used in the Orion area,
we can keep our communications with home base open, and at the same time force
the Masters to come out and fight . . . perhaps before they're really ready for a
showdown."
"Sounds good
enough," Marsh said.
"We'll
go slowly at first," Jeff said. "In a few weeks we should be joined
by the Komani. Terry, they'll come under your command."
"Okay," he said.
"There's
a Star Watch fleet on its way from the Confederation, too. It will stop at
Morenia and join the humankind fleet, which Commanders Daguerre and Panjart are
organizing. In less than two months we should have a fighting force that'll
make the Masters' eyes pop ... if they have eyes."
Marsh
and Terry left after a few more minutes' conversation, and returned to their
own ships just before the fleet went into superlight overdrive.
As
Jeff saw them to the shuttle rocket, I stayed on the bridge and looked at the
galaxy map on the view-screen. It was a long, long way down that spiral arm of
stars to the galaxy's central hub. And somewhere in that vast nucleus of stars
and star clusters was the Masters' globular cluster. How many battles would we
have to fight before we found it? How many years would it take to make our way
through that immense distance?
My
gaze inadvertently drifted back up the spiral to a small blue dot off to one
side of the Terran Confederation: Rh'khour'mnin. Only three hundred fifty
light-years from Sol, but in the opposite direction from our goal.
"I know what you're
thinking."
I turned to see Jeff
standing beside me.
"I didn't know you had
returned."
He
smiled. "I can guess how you feel about the way the war's going ... we seem to be getting farther from your
home worlds, instead of closer to them."
"Yes. But I
understand."
"Alan,
if I had the ships and men to spare, I'd send you back to free your cluster.
But I can't afford to right now."
"I
know," I said. "It would merely involve you in a needless fight that
could tie down valuable forces for months. The Saurians occupying Rh'khour'mnin
haven't the strength to attack the Confederation by themselves, but they could
cause plenty of trouble for an invading force."
Jeff nodded. "It has
to wait, Alan, but someday...."
"Someday,"
I agreed. "Really, it is not as vital to me as you think. I... I hardly know my own people; I am much
more familiar with the Saurians than my fellow humans. But someday, if we live
to see it, I would like to liberate Rh'kliour'mnin and give my people back the
sense of dignity and self-confidence which the Masters have taken from
them."
For three months we slashed our way through
the Masters' territory without much opposition.
It
was a repetition of our earlier raids: the fleet would pick out an enemy base
and neutralize its patrol ships, spaceports, and ground installations; then
Terry and his men would land on the planet and mop up what was left. There was
plenty of hard fighting on the planets, but no enemy fleet appeared to oppose
us.
And,
of course, Terry had the Komani serving under him now. They were fierce
fighters, afraid of nothing.
But
they were hard to control. On one planet they decided to loot the defeated
Saurians, and only Terry's unhesitating threat to take his ships away and leave
them stranded on the planet halted them.
After
that, Tamar Kang personally saw to it that looters were discouraged—usually by
capital punishment. And Jeff saw to it that the Komani, as well as all his
men, were constantly rewarded with fresh equipment and gear, and plenty of
food.
Commander
Daguerre rejoined the fleet with the humankind contingents—which numbered
almost as many as the expeditionary force and Komani combined, and we
encountered thousands more human star systems as we penetrated deeper into the
galaxy's heart. Jeff left teams of Terran scientists and administrators in
each group of systems, and we were provided with a constant trickle of recruits
to swell the ranks of the humankind army.
In
their determination not to leave a single enemy base intact behind us, Terry
and his men even began raiding the big, low-density, Jupiter-like planets where
the Hydra were stationed. Encased in special one-man flying pressure tanks,
Terrans, Komani, and humankind troops dived into the heavy gravity and ammonia
and methane atmospheres to carry the fighting right down to the Hydra's lairs.
Special
detection devices were needed because human eyesight was practically useless
on those frozen, dark worlds; they were developed and built. Special tactics
were needed to fight the constantly retreating, ambushing Hydra; they were
created, improved upon, and became second nature to Terry's men.
But no matter how many planets we captured,
no matter how many human star systems we liberated, no Masters' fleet appeared
to challenge us.
"They're
waiting for us to stretch our communications line back home to the breaking
point," Jeff observed. "They've plenty of territory; they can afford
to give ground, build up their own fleet, and wait for us to make a
mistake."
But
Jeff was wrong. The Masters did not wait for our mistake.
They
struck at precisely the time and place they had picked months earlier.
It happened when we were more than a thousand
light-years from Morenia; fully fifteen hundred light-years from Sol.
We
had reached a curious gap in the starry arm of the galaxy, an open space devoid
of stars, about a hundred or two hundred light-years across. It was difficult
to tell how wide it was, because this was strange territory to us, and the
astronomers needed time to make careful observations and check them.
Ahead
of us was this gap; to one side was the rift between the Orion and Sagittarius
arms of the galaxy —a giant gulf between two of the spiral arms that ran beside
one another out of the central nucleus of the Milky Way.
On our other side was a long stretch of
interstellar gas and dust: nothing to be afraid of in itself, but extremely
difficult to see through, even by electronic means.
The fleet had spread out quite a bit despite
Jeff's best efforts to keep it together; so now, as we faced the gap, we came
out of subspace and regrouped.
As the fleet tightened its formation and
coasted in normal space at sublight speeds, Jeff sent out a swarm of scouts. He
was particularly suspicious of that big, impenetrably opaque cloud on our left
flank.
"If
I were attempting to trap an enemy fleet," he muttered, looking at the
vast darkness of the cloud in the bridge's viewscreen, "this would be the
place I'd do it."
Several
hours passed, the ships gradually regrouped into their assigned formations,
reports came in a steady stream to the bridge of Jeff's cruiser, but he still
watched the viewscreen moodily.
He
was tense, like an animal sniffing the wind to see if a predator is lurking
nearby, stalking him.
And then it came.
EMERGENCY. IMMENSE ENEMY FORCE DEPLOYED IN DUST CLOUD ON YOUR FLANK.
ADVANCE UNITS CIRCLING TO YOUR REAR. ESTIMATE THEM AT LEAST FIVE OR SIX TIMES.
. . .
The
report ticker abruptly stopped chugging, its tape hanging limply from the
output slot, big red letters blaring danger.
"Where's
the rest of that message?" Jeff bawled into his intercom.
"Sorry,
sir," the tech down in the communications center answered, "the
message stopped. We lost contact, sir."
Jeff turned to me.
"That's one scout they got."
He
punched the general alarm button on his view-screen and began issuing orders.
Meanwhile the ticker suddenly chugged to life again.
ENEMY
FLEET LYING ASTRADDLE OUR INTENDED COURSE THROUGH GAP. ROUGHLY FOUR TIMES OUR
NUMBER. HEAVY
CRUISERS,
DREADNAUGHTS PREDOMINATE IN BATTLE FORMATION.
There
were hundreds of such reports pouring out of the ticker, the viewscreen, the
voice beams . . . every method of communication open to us.
They
all added up to a dangerous picture: the Saurians and Hydra had a strong force
directly ahead of us, and an even larger force on our left flank. They were
circling around us, attempting a mammoth en-globement, and we had no way to
retreat except into the starless void of the rift.
"Retreat
will be no good," Jeff said. "They'll merely march in and occupy the
star systems we've just come through and wait for us to come out of
subspace."
"But
wouldn't it be better to fight them at a place of our own choosing?" I
asked.
But
Jeff shook his head. "You saw how scattered we were after a short hop in
subspace. If we popped out of subspace in that shape, they'd just pick us off
one by one. No, we fight here . . ." He grinned. "This is what we've
been asking for. Now, we fight or die."
I smiled back; rather
weakly, I fear.
"Scared?"
I nodded.
"Good.
Anyone who says he's not is a liar. Well, let's go to work."
I
took over handling incoming reports, feeding die main ones to Jeff, as he took
up his station at the view-screen where he could analyze the whole situation
and command his fleet.
The
enemy ships were coming out of the dust cloud now, all along our left flank,
stretching out in a network several ships deep, and so long that even our biggest scanners
could not get them all into one picture screen.
Jeff
sent Terry and his men to our rear to form a stationary defense line and
prevent the enemy from swinging up around us and completing an englobe-ment. It
was a desperate maneuver because Terry's ships were not intended for deep-space
fighting; they were troopships, lightly armed and not as well protected as the
battle cruisers. Jeff ordered as many scouts and picket ships as he could
afford to aid Terry's stand.
Then
he split his battle cruisers into three units. The largest—consisting mostly of
untested humankind ships mixed with Star Watch forces from the Confederation—he
stationed along the flank with orders to slow down the advancing enemy as much
as possible.
Jeff
placed his second unit—largely veteran expeditionary force men—on his right
flank, to one side of the enemy force ahead of us. Then he and the smallest
group of all, but a group consisting of the fastest, heaviest cruisers he had,
sped toward the "corner" formed by the juncture of the two enemy
forces.
"We've
got to hit them hard and fast," he told his ship commanders. "Smash
into them, shock them, pry them apart . . . break open their lines and fall in
on the flank of the bigger force."
As
we charged across the emptiness toward the enemy, I suddenly began to feel
sick. At first I did not know what was causing it ... I felt a dull pain in my head, and a queasy, almost nauseous
sensation in my innards.
I recall trying to keep control of myself and
not let anyone see how I felt, for fear they might think me sick from cowardice.
But
as I gripped the edges of the little table on one side of Jeff's bridge,
struggling to remain conscious and alert, no one noticed me at all.
They were too busy trying
to keep alive.
Jeffs
flying charge into the Saurian line was only partially successful. The small
group of cruisers hit the enemy with a terrific shock, buckled their line, but
failed to break it. The Saurians had packed their ships ten- and twenty-deep .
. . Jeff's force simply did not have the weight to penetrate them.
I
learned later that Jeff swung his group around, digging into the side of the
Saurian fleet that was advancing out of the dust cloud. With his ships blasting
one end of the line, and the humankind group making the enemy pay dearly for
every step forward they took, the whole big Saurian line was slowly grinding
to a halt.
The
whole line, that is, except for the flying detachment that had been sent to
circle our rear. This fast attack group ran into Terry's troopships and scouts.
Terry's men fought valiantly, but they simply could not cope with fully-armed
cruisers. They were pushed back, taking fearful losses as he stubbornly
retreated.
I must have lost
consciousness.
One
moment I was fighting for self-control, sitting rigidly at the table while
reports piled up before me. . . .
The
next thing I knew I was refocusing my eyes on Jeff's intent face. He was
leaning over me. I was flat on the bridge's deck.
"Alan, what is
it?"
"The
battle . . . forget about me . . . you have to direct the fleet.. . ."
New
faces appeared in front of me. I was picked up and placed back in my chair.
Someone was feeling my wrist, someone else holding an odd-looking instrument
before me.
"Commander!
The right wing has been shattered!" I heard a viewscreen voice shrill.
"The enemy is pouring through and englobing us!"
"All
ships in Unit Three come about," Jeff barked. "Disengage the enemy
and proceed at full speed to the right flank!"
The
ship lurched crazily, knocking me back onto the deck. The bridge lights
wavered, then steadied.
I
got up under my own power while the other men on the bridge did likewise.
"Almost blew out the
energy screen," Jeff muttered.
"Sir,"
one of the medical officers said, "we . . . eh, we can't seem to find
anything wrong with him, sir. Pulse beat is high, but nothing else out of the
usual."
I
leaned against the table. The nauseous feeling was gone, but I felt weak, and
my head was throbbing as though ...
as though .. . suddenly I knew!
"Jeff! Jeff! The
Masters! They are here!"
"What?"
"My
sickness . . . I've been receiving powerful mental impulses ... so powerful they upset my entire
nervous system."
Jeff
waved the two medical officers away. I sat at my chair again and Jeff leaned
over the table.
"We've
only got a few minutes before we're back in action again, Alan. What are you
trying to tell me?"
"The Masters are here, somewhere in this
area. They must be directing the Saurian fleets by telepathy. I felt some of
their impulses . . . that's what made me sick."
Jeff eyed me intently. "Do you feel them
now?" "Only faintly."
"Where were they most intense?" "A few minutes ago,"
I said. "When I lost consciousness."
Jeff
said nothing. But his mouth was clenched into a thin line, and his eyes were
ablaze.
He
whirled to the viewscreen and punched a button. "All ships in Unit Three:
cancel previous order. Follow my ship . . . wherever I go, follow me.
Then
he turned back to me. "Alan, can you lead us to the Masters? Are you up to
it?"
"I can try," I
said.
"Trying
is no good," he told me. "We're outnumbered a dozen to one, and
almost englobed. Finding the Masters and destroying them is our only hope of
getting out of this alive. We've got to destroy the enemy's commanders. Will
you lead us to them?"
I took a deep breath.
"I will."
The
next few minutes I shall never forget. Most of all, the expression on Jeff's
face—white-lipped determination and eyes flashing with eagerness, as though he
realized how close he was standing to death, yet dared death to claim him. That
look on Jeff's face will always be burning in memory.
I
have only seen it twice in my life. This was the first time.
Jeff's
little squad of ships was racing across a crumbling Terran line back to the
spot where I had felt the Masters' presence to be strongest. Meanwhile, the
Saurians were tightening their globe around us, battering our badly
outnumbered ships. They seemed certain of victory.
The
pain was returning. To anyone who has not experienced the overwhelming pressure
of tremendous mental forces smashing against him as impersonally as an ocean
wave breaks against a sea wall . . . what I was feeling was indescribable.
The
Masters were sending telepathic messages to the Saurian ships. I was receiving
parts of those messages; not enough to understand them, only enough to feel.
And the feeling was pain.
Jeff's
ship scuttled across the advancing Saurian line. I felt the pain start to
recede and told him to double back. We did, and the throbbing in my head grew.
The
ship turned along that line and started in toward the Saurians. The pain became
steadily more intense.
Finally,
it was a thick haze around me ...
surrounding me with agony.
Dimly,
I felt the ship bounce and shudder as Saurian force beams pounded us. Vaguely,
I heard Jeff calling for every available Terran and humankind ship to join him
in a desperate slashing drive into the enemy line. Far, far off, I seemed to
see his face: weary but determined. Exultantly defiant.
And then the pain snapped
off!
I
looked up, and Jeff was staring unbelievingly at the viewscreen.
"They've
just disappeared," he said. "Just winked off, like a fight."
The communications tech's startled face
appeared on the screen. "Sir, as far as we can tell . . . they jumped into
subspace."
"Without any build-up
of acceleration at all?"
The
tech shook his head. "They were sitting there one moment, sir . . . the
next instant they were gone!"
Jeff turned to me.
"They're
gone," I said. "I can't feel them any longer."
We
had smashed through the Saurian line of ships and spotted six ships—the Masters.
As Jeff bored in on them, they vanished.
And
within minutes we began receiving the real proof: what had been a
carefully-integrated, well-organized Saurian attack was splintering up into a
hundred fragments.
Saurian
units were no longer meshed together in a mammoth fleet that moved as one
single group. They were individual units again, disjointed, out of contact with
one another.
Without
the Masters to guide the over-all battle, the Saurians were suddenly deprived
of their communications and intelligence. They hesitated, confused. And in
that hesitation, Jeff struck. He rattled off orders in an unending flow for
almost six hours. He organized his badly mauled fleet into a single-minded
fighting force that slashed viciously at the confused Saurians. With nothing
more than his unquenchable personality, he turned a shattered, defeated fleet
into a cohesive, disciplined force.
Jeff
threw every ship that could still move into one flank of the surrounding enemy.
The Saurians gave ground, split apart, then—as the humans concentrated a
withering fire on one hapless section of their enemies —they turned and fled.
That
was the breaking-point. Jeff's ships fell on the other Saurians, who were
either milling about waiting for orders or were already sliding out of
formation and heading for safer parts of the galaxy.
At
the end of six hours the nearly-victorious Saurians had been reduced to a
panic-stricken mob fleeing in all directions, with the grim Terrans and their
allies wreaking a fearful vengeance on them.
For
three days we pursued the remnants of the Saurian fleet and hunted for the
disappeared Masters. Finally Jeff called a halt and ordered all ships to return
to formation for repairs and new orders.
When
the Terran staff finally got together, no one present had enjoyed more than six
hours' sleep in the past four days. But they were all jubilant about our
victory.
All but Jeff.
"We
haven't won a victory," he told us. "We merely scattered a fleet that
nearly wiped us out. Most of that fleet escaped. And we still have more than
twenty thousand light-years between us and the Masters' homeworlds. Do you
realize how many fleets like this last one they can organize in all that
area?"
Chapter 9 The Gamble
n the histories that have been written, taped, sung, and carved into stone
in different parts of the galaxy, what happened next to Jeff and his men has
been variously described as the result of careful scientific investigation, the
laws of probability, luck, and divine inspiration.
If
it was any of these, it was all of them. Certainly it was careful scientific
probing that unraveled the mythology of the Komani folk sagas. A staff of
anthropologists, led by a perpetually-smiling, dark-skinned young Terran from
Aldebaran, Ernesto Bardun, had been working on the Komani sagas since Jeff
first ordered a study of the catlike warrior race.
Now,
after months of puzzling together allegorical references, clues that had been
obscured by the passage of uncounted ages, Bardun and his aides thought they
had a good idea of where the Komani's original homeworlds had been.
And, more important, once they knew that,
they could estimate with fair accuracy the location of the Masters' star
cluster.
The
laws of probability entered the picture when Terry's men, who had been assigned
to mopping-up operations after the Battle of the Gap, stumbled onto an intact
set of Saurian star charts.
They
swooped down on a lonely planetoid huddled close to a dwarf star, after
discovering a damaged Saurian cruiser there. The Terrans seized the ship before
it could be destroyed by its surprised crew. The Terran patrol leader caught
the Saurian captain in the act of attempting to burn the star charts. The
captain was shot when he chose to fight rather than surrender.
The
star charts came to me for translation into Terran.
Their
coordinate system was unlike any I had ever seen before; the names and
classifications of the stars were meaningless to me. But in the center of one
of those charts was a globular cluster of stars marked with only one word: Masters.
Not
even the astronomers could get any useful information out of the captured
Saurian maps until they got together with the anthropologists, who supplied a
coordinate system they had learned from the Komani.
It
was lucky for us that these two events happened almost simultaneously. One was
incomprehensible without the other.
The
maps began to make sense. And the location of the Masters' cluster which the
maps showed agreed rather well with that deduced by the anthropologists from
the Komani sagas. This made the anthropologists feel much better, because they
had been the first to point out that their conclusions were based on very
tenuous evidence.
So
scientific investigation, the laws of probability, and luck added up to point
the way to the Masters' homeworlds.
The divine inspiration came
from Jeif.
It
took a few weeks for all this to happen. The main body of the fleet was tending
to its wounds after what the historians now call the Battle of the Gap.
Officially, we had won a victory, but we all knew how close to disaster we had
come.
Meanwhile,
the astronomers and anthropologists huddled together for days on end—and often
long into the night—to decipher the tantalizingly obscure information they had
obtained.
When
they finally agreed on a firm location for the Masters' home cluster, I went
straight to Jeff.
Well,
not exactly straight. First, I put in a call for Marsh; I knew he would be
interested in the star maps, which were now fully translated into the Terran
language and coordinate system.
I
waited almost an hour in my cabin with the maps locked in my desk while the
fleet communications people tried to find Marsh. Finally a puzzled-looking
young tech appeared on my viewsereen:
"Sir,
we can't find Officer Jordan. His ship is reported to be on special detached
duty, by order of the commander."
I
was surprised at first. Then, as I threaded my way through the ship's corridors
to Jeff's cabin, I became just as puzzled about it as the tech. I decided to
ask
Jeff
about it, since I was bringing the maps and the news to him, anyway.
But
my news about the Masters' home cluster had to wait. Jeff was on the bridge,
locked in a quiet but grim struggle with Tamar Kang.
"My
men were forced to sit in your cramped little ships while the Saurians shot us
down like vermin," Kang was rumbling, as I came on the bridge.
Jeff
looked tired, sitting in his chair beside the chart table. "I know your
losses were heavy. Terry's men took the same punishment. It couldn't be
helped."
"We
were not even allowed to fight," Kang continued, pacing all the while.
"If
I had fighting ships to put you in, and you knew how to fly them, don't you
think I'd have let you fight?" Jeff answered. "There were no planets
in the area of the battle, so there was no ground-based fighting."
"My
men are unhappy," Tamar Kang went on, "and my people mourn their
dead."
"So
do I," Jeff said. "I mourn them all . . . and I mourn for those who
are yet to die."
Tamar
Kang stopped his pacing before Jeff's chair. His immense frame loomed over
Jeff.
"My
warriors are ashamed to have been in a battle without firing a shot," he
said, "and they have suffered many killed ... in a coward's death."
Jeff
rose from his chair to his full height. He was still more than a head shorter
than Kang, but his ramrod posture and blazing eyes forced the bigger man back
a step.
"You
and your men will see enough fighting in the months to come. You will all live
in the memory of your people as the greatest heroes the Komani have known. All
men, everywhere in the galaxy, will remember you." But for now, you must
be patient."
Tamar
Kang blinked his eyes once, then replied: "A warrior cannot sit and do
nothing. My men need a battle. Find us a Saurian planet, and we will destroy
it."
"Can't
do it," Jeff said, shaking his head. "The only Saurian bases in this
area have already been attacked from aloft by our cruisers. The only other
inhabited planets within fifty light-years are occupied by Saurian civilians."
"Let us attack one of
them and loot it."
"No!"
Jeff snapped. "We are fighting the armies of the Masters, not civilians.
You'll get enough fighting as soon as the fleet is ready to move again ... we have a lifetime of fighting ahead of
us."
Tamar
Kang turned and started to leave. Just before he reached the doorway I was standing in, he turned back to Jeff.
"Some
of my men might commandeer a small ship and its crew and raid a Saurian planet
on their own. I cannot control them all under these conditions."
Jeff
leaned tiredly on the bridge rail. "Any ship trying to leave the present
limits of our formation will be shot down by our pickets. That's a standing
order. Tell your restless warriors that for me."
Kang bristled. "I
will!"
He stormed past me and
left.
Jeff slumped wearily into
his chair.
"You look tired,"
I said.
"I am."
I sat in a chair next to
him. "Are you ill?"
"No, I don't think so.
It's just that keeping the
Komani
and humankind contingents happy and in line is a much bigger job than
commanding the expeditionary force."
"I
know. You've been working too hard, too long. You should rest."
"Rest?" he smiled bitterly.
"With Tamar Kang grumbling and the humankind leaders still scared stiff
from their first battle? With nothing in sight but more battles against
constantly-stronger enemies? Who can rest?"
"I can see you need
some good news."
"I could use
some," Jeff said.
"Then
listen: we have located the home cluster of the Masters."
Jeff
stared at me without speaking. You could hear the soft droning hum of the
ship's electrical system, the muted rumble of her engines, and the faint sounds
of men moving and working on the control deck below the bridge.
Finally Jeff uttered a
single word: "Definitely?"
I
nodded. "The astronomers and anthropologists have double-checked each
other. We have found information in the Komani sagas and captured Saurian star
charts."
You
could see the tiredness drain out of Jeff. "Well, any time you can get
astronomers and anthropologists to agree with one another," he grinned,
"you must
be on the right
track."
I
spread the Saurian maps and their Terran counterparts on the chart table, and
told Jeff the whole story in detail.
He
listened, asking a question here and there. When I was through, he said,
"I want you to double-check this. We captured several high-ranking
Saurians in this last battle. See if you can get an affirmation of this from
them."
"Very
well," I said. "I had also intended to show these maps to Marsh, to
see if they are sufficient for navigational purposes."
Jeff
nodded. "Good idea. They look as though they'll be plenty to navigate by.
Marsh is on a special assignment for me, but he should be back in a day or two
... I hope."
Jeff's
face was bright with eagerness now. But underlying it was a tenseness, an
unshakable determination. I could
sense that his mind was leaping ahead now, foreseeing battles and campaigns
that would take place months, even years, from now.
What
I did not realize was that we would never fight those battles.
Questioning the upper echelon Saurian
prisoners about the location of the Masters' home cluster was simple.
I
merely projected a picture of their own star chart on a viewscreen, then brought
them into the room one by one. All I had
to do was check their reactions to two questions. I became a living lie
detector.
The questions:
"Do
you know the location of the home cluster of the Masters?"
"Is that location
shown accurately on this map?"
To
the last man, every Saurian answered no to the first question and refused to
answer the second one at all. And they all clamped down on their subconscious
telepathic activity as hard as possible.
Some of them were either telling the truth,
or were extremely good at controlling their telepathic reactions. But most of
them were almost visibly startled when they saw the map, and jolted out a burst
of subconscious impulses when I asked the questions.
The
evidence was conclusive, then. We had the Masters' homeworlds definitely
spotted. But there was still roughly twenty-five thousand light-years between
us and their cluster. And we had to fight our way down a spiral arm of stars,
which made the distance even greater.
That is where Jeff's divine
inspiration came in.
I
had spent a whole day in questioning Saurian prisoners, and was midway through
a second day's worth, when one of the Terran guards told me I had been summoned
to the bridge.
I
left the improvised brig—actually unused cargo compartments—and went up to
Jeff's nerve center.
Terry was on the bridge
with Jeff. And Marsh.
Marsh
was in the middle of an excited explanation: ". . . and back again in a
week! We accelerated half the distance, then decelerated the rest of the way
until we came out into normal space. Our top speed was phenomenal . . . and we
could have kept right on accelerating, gaining speed, as long as we
wanted!"
"Where
did you come out?" Jeff asked. He was standing by the message ticker with
Terry.
"Right
smack on the button within ten minutes from parking orbit at Pluto!" Marsh
slapped the chart table with his open palm at every word.
"Pluto?" I asked
from the corridor doorway.
They turned to me.
"Alan," Jeff
called. "Glad you're here. I didn't want to disturb your questioning of
the prisoners, but as you can see, our prodigal has returned."
"I
don't understand," I said. "Did you say you went to Pluto?"
Marsh
was grinning with the delight of complete triumph. "Yes, I said Pluto. And
Neptune. And Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars."
"What
our excitable friend is trying to say," Terry explained, not perfectly
calm himself, "is that he's tested the new subspace navigational
system."
"And
it works!" Marsh exclaimed. "It works beautifully."
"I
sent Marsh to die Solar system to test his navigation idea," Jeff said
quietly. "He made it to Pluto in a little under three days, spent a day at
Star Watch Prime Base on Mars, and returned to the fleet in a total elapsed
time of six days . . ."
"Seventeen
hours, twenty-two minutes and point zero eight one seconds," Marsh
finished.
We
all laughed. Jeff asked, "I meant to ask you about the time. Many
physicists say there should be a time difference in subspace. How did the
clocks on your ship check with the clocks on Mars and back here at the
fleet?"
"On
the nose," Marsh said. "First thing I checked. Personally. Curious
about it, myself. No detectable difference, and these atomic clocks are good
down to one second every three, four thousand years."
"Well,
that does it," Jeff said. "That's all the evidence you need."
"By
the way," Marsh said, "while I was on Mars, the Chief Coordinator
gave me two things to deliver to you personally, in addition to the routine
messages and reports I brought."
Marsh
walked over to one of the chairs, where he had left a small pouch. He reached
into it and pulled out an envelope and a little black plastic box.
"First:
a new rank has been created for you, Jeff-Special Coordinator, in charge of Galactic
Operations. The Council voted you this rank shortly after the battle at
Epsilon Orionis."
Marsh
handed Jeff the box, and he opened it. Inside were two star-shaped diamond
insignia clips.
"I'll
have to show these to Tamar Kang," Jeff kidded. "Increase his respect
for me."
"The
other item I'm supposed to deliver is a message. It's confidential. . .
."
"We have no secrets
among ourselves," Jeff said.
Marsh
nodded. "That's what I thought." He looked us over with a malicious
grin, relishing our anticipation. "The Chief Coordinator told me that
he's ready to resign his post in your favor any time you say."
Jeff
was genuinely surprised. "What? Resign . . . why?"
"He
wasn't fooling," Marsh said, "or trying to make you feel good. Don't
you realize that most of the Star Watch is now under your -command? The only
forces left back at the Confederation are the border patrols, a few token
garrisons, the various planetary militia, and the Prime Base staff. You've got
the meat of the fighting ships and men."
"But
I'm still following orders from Prime Base," Jeff argued.
"What orders?"
Marsh asked. "They can't give you orders, and they know it. How can they
command you from Mars when you're out here in an area no Terran has ever seen
before? You're running the show . . . whether it's official or not."
Jeff
leaned back in his chair. "Yes," he said, thoughtfully, "I
realized that a long time ago. But I guess I just didn't want to make it
official. We can leave things as they are—officially—for the time being. As
long as no one tries to interfere with us."
That
was the first time I had heard Jeff acknowledge the fact of his unrivaled
position of authority. For many months we had all realized that he was the most
powerful leader the Terrans had. There was no unusual excitement or discussion
about it. It was simply a fact. Now Jeff would soon have to accept the formal
recognition of his leadership, with all the responsibilities it would add to
his already-heavy burden.
He
kept pretty much to himself for the next few days. We were all busy getting the
fleet back into fighting trim. Marsh leaped joyfully into the work of preparing
subspace navigational charts based on the captured Saurian maps.
Then came the message from
the Masters.
This
time it was delivered, not by a Saurian intermediary, but directly by the
Masters themselves.
It
had been almost a week since I had seen Jeff, and after finishing my duties for
the day, I went to the bridge to find out how he was.
As
I arrived there, Jeff was sitting before the view-screen, talking to his chief
communications officer. Some extremely powerful interference was drowning out
our ship-to-ship tri-di messages. The communications techs had been reduced to
using voice beams only, and even these were being garbled by the interference.
"See
if you can track down the source and keep me posted," Jeff said, then shut
off the screen. He swiveled his chair toward me. "Hi, Alan."
We
talked for several moments, then the screen flashed on again. It was the
communications officer. He looked shaken.
"Sir!
We're receiving a message from outside the fleet!"
"Outside
the fleet?" Jeff puzzled. "Who in space could?"
"It's
the source of the interference, sir," the officer explained hastily.
"The message is drowning out our own broadcasts. It's on an unusual
frequency, our receivers weren't properly tuned for it."
"What's the
message?"
The
officer's troubled face disappeared, and a view of space filled the screen:
thousands of stars, so many of diem that they formed clouds swirling as far as
the eye could see, and in the foreground the closer stars sparkled like
gigantic solitary jewels.
A
voice was saying: ". . . all these are but a small part of our empire. You
Terrans cannot conceive of the majesty and immensity of our civilization.
Worlds without end are armed to battle you. For every ship you have, we can
launch a thousand against you. For every man you have, we can send a million
warriors who have spent their lives conquering the galaxy. Know that to fight against
us is hopeless. You cannot win. Go back to your meager worlds on the rim of the
galaxy and we will suffer you to live in your own barbaric manner."
The scene shifted, and we watched as a single
yellowish star seemed to rush toward us until it filled the viewscreen.
"But
if you insist on fighting against us," the voice went on, "watch and
learn what awaits you. This star is very much like your own beloved Sol.
Imagine it to be Sol, with your precious planets of home circling about it.
Observe!"
The
screen flared into a brilliance so terrific that we both threw our arms over
our faces, and even then the glare left us blinded for several moments.
When
we recovered, the screen was dead. Then the communications officers face
reappeared. "They . . . they've cut off . . . end of message, I
guess."
Jeff
nodded, his face a mask. He turned the screen off.
For
several minutes neither of us said a word. I could sense Jeff's reaction—anger,
fear, uncertainty about how this would affect the humankind allies-all this I
expected. But something else was racing through Jeff's mind, a steady current
of mental energy that was not emotion but precise, hard, rational thinking.
Jeff was creating a plan.
The report ticker clacked off a message from one of our scouts: supernova observed at coordinates minus 06732j84 time 1742.
astronomer aboard puzzled by briefness and intensity of explosion. no star visible at that location now.
I
pulled off the tape and handed it to Jeff. He glanced at it, then said, "I
thought so. Well, this confirms it."
He swiveled his chair around and slapped a
button on the viewscreen. "Call my complete staff to the bridge,
please."
Jeff
turned back to me, and smiled grimly. "The Masters have called the tune,
and we'll have to do some pretty fancy dancing. I've been considering a
possible plan of action for some time . . . but now it's the only course left
open to us."
Within
an hour Jeff's bridge was crowded with his regular Star Watch staff, plus
various leaders of the humankind contingents and Tamar Kang and a few Komani
lesser chieftains.
Most
of them had seen the Masters' message. Those that had not, had already heard
about it. A bubbling undercurrent of fear pervaded the bridge, although no one
mentioned it aloud. Each man saw his own home star exploded, his homeworld
vaporized.
And each man looked to
Jeff.
They
talked in worried whispers as they assembled on the bridge. Jeff was in his
cabin with Marsh and Terry. I stayed outside, sizing up their feelings.
Then
Jeff stepped out on the bridge. All conversation stopped.
"There's
no need of me explaining why I called you here," he began directly.
"You all know the Masters' threat. It's no bluff, I'm sure of that. But it
is an admission of fear on their part...."
"On
their part?" one of the humankind leaders gasped. "They've threatened
to obliterate our home-worlds. . . ."
"I
know," Jeff said quietly. "But by that threat they've inadvertently
admitted that we are posing a tremendous military problem for them."
Jeff walked along the railing of the bridge
as he spoke, looking from man to man, "If they thought they could defeat
our fleet as easily as they claim, they wouldn't try to frighten us into
running back home. And the very nature of their threat takes the form of
terror, not military action. An army tries to defeat another army; war is
fought to force your will on the enemy's people. But destroying the enemy—as
the Masters have threatened—is not war. And it leaves no profit from victory. .
.
"And
certainly none from defeat," Tamar Kang remarked dryly.
"I'm
convinced the Masters are afraid of us," Jeff said.
"That
doesn't help us," Commander Daguerre observed.
"Yes
it does," Jeff countered. "But no matter. Look! The Masters must need
time, and a lot of it. Their military organization in this area is shattered.
Even if they intend to destroy our stars, they'll need a military expedition
and they'll need time to organize it."
Several men nodded
agreement.
"We
wont allow them that time," Jeff said. "We're going to strike
directly at the Masters' homeworlds. Now!"
At
first the words dazed them. Then, slowly, realization began to dawn.
"The Masters'
homeworlds?"
"But the distance. . .
."
"We don't even know
where they are."
"There
are a thousand armies and fleets between us and the center of the galaxy."
"It will take years to
reach there."
Finally,
they realized that Jeff knew something they did not. They stopped objecting and
listened.
Jeff
said simply, "We have learned from several sources the location of the
Masters' home cluster. And Officer Jordan, here, has developed a technique for
navigation in subspace. He's already tested it, and it works. Marsh, how long
will it take us to fly to the Masters' cluster?"
"About
a month," Marsh answered, "if we stay in subspace all the way."
"But it's
impossible."
"What's
to stop the Masters from wiping out our star systems while the fleet is in
subspace?"
Jeff
motioned for silence. "Now listen to me," he said. "We've got to
race against time. If we can hit the Masters' cluster within a month or even
six weeks from now, we can shatter their whole system so completely that
they'll never be able to counterattack our homeworlds. Perhaps we can end the
war."
They
buzzed objections and arguments for several minutes.
Finally
Jeff said, "The decision is yours to make. The Terran Expeditionary Force
leaves in forty-eight hours. In twenty-four hours I'll have to know who wants
to accompany us. I will not take any man or group that does not wish to
come."
The
group broke up into knots of puzzled, chattering men who slowly drifted from
the bridge to the shuttle rockets that had carried them to Jeff's cruiser.
We
spent that night and most of the next day waiting.
Then,
slowly at first, but in an ever-increasing flood, came tri-di calls and
personal visits from the various humankind leaders. By dinnertime, more than half of them had agreed to
try Jeff's gamble.
Almost
exactly twenty-four hours after Jeff's request, Tamar Kang appeared on the
bridge.
"The
Council of Elders and my chief warriors have voted to follow you to the
Masters' cluster," he said simply.
"Good!"
Jeff said, reaching out to grasp the Ko-mani's giant hand.
Tamar
Kang parted his lips in what was probably a smile. "And on the planets
that have been capital of the galaxy since time immemorial," Kang said,
"there will be much loot."
"There
will be no looting as long as you're under my command," Jeff snapped.
"Of course,"
Tamar King murmured. "Of course."
The
month in subspace was monotonous for most of the men, but not for us. Jeff was
nearly killed.
He
had taken to prowling restlessly through the ship, instead of remaining at his
usual nerve center on the bridge.
During
one of his frequent tours through the big cruiser, a pair of Komani
chieftains—who were aboard as liaison officers for
Tamar Kang—burst into the corridor Jeff was walking through. They were yelling
wildly and brandishing force-beam side arms. One of them fired a bolt at Jeff.
Jeff
ducked out of the way as the beam ripped open the corridor wall beside him. A
Star Watch guard, who had been stationed nearby, heard the blast and rushed
into the corridor, his rifle cocked and ready.
The
Komani insisted that they were having a private argument and had not seen Jeff.
Terry was all in favor of executing the two of them, but Jeff ordered them
placed in the brig until we came out of subspace and they could be transferred
to Tamar Kang's ship for his own judgment of them.
In
the end it didn't matter. One of the Komani strangled the other, and then
committed suicide with a small blade he had concealed in his boot.
Terry
insisted it had been an attempted assassination, and Tamar Kang's idea. Jeff
shrugged it off; but he no longer wandered through the ship alone.
It
was all quickly forgotten, though, when we came out of subspace and saw the
incredible brilliance of the Masters' star cluster close at hand.
Chapter
JO
Conqueror and
Captive
was born
and spent most of my life in an open cluster of about five hundred stars. The
paucity of stars in Sol's neighborhood grieved me. Terrans lived in a stellar
desert.
But
I was as unprepared as any Terran for the overpowering beauty of a globular
cluster seen close at hand . . . more than ten thousand stars filling every
angle of the sky. As we flew into the Masters' cluster, space became a night
without darkness, a child's wonderland of countless brilliant stars, almost
close enough to touch. It was so dazzling that it seemed we had flown into the
heart of some massive, gleaming gem.
They
were mostly red stars, of tremendous size but very low density, and very cool.
Many of them were visibly pulsing, undulating.
"Dying
stars," Jeff said as we watched them through his viewscreen.
"These
globular clusters must contain the oldest stars in the galaxy," Marsh
said.
202
Except for that first brief glimpse of
incomparable glory, we had little time for sight-seeing. We were in the enemy's
capital, and as we girded for battle the feeling ran through the ship that this
was the final struggle, win or lose.
Even
Jeff, normally the calmest person in the fleet as a battle approached, was as
impatient and jumpy as a high-strung musician preparing to try his most
difficult solo.
"This
could be it," he muttered to me as we sped into the cluster. "One
fight more—the best and the last," he quoted.
We
expected to be swarmed upon by thousands of enemy ships. But only a few buzzed
up from the myriad star systems, and they were quickly dispatched by Jeff's
pickets and the outermost ring of battle cruisers.
Terry
landed with a detachment of troops on the first planet we came to. It was
densely populated with Saurians, almost entirely covered with vast complexes
of factories, building-sized computers, spaceports, mammoth concentrations of
dwellings—and it was practically undefended!
The
Terran troops swept through a feeble resistance, rounded up the Saurian
soldiers in a few hours, and were ready to hop to the next point of attack. The
buildings and civilian population were left untouched, once the Saurians
surrendered.
This
went on for several days. Saurian resistance was practically nonexistent, and
Jeff's men and ships spread through the cluster in ever-widening waves,
crushing what little enemy action they encountered.
The
Saurians seemed shocked, totally unprepared for fighting, and unable to
organize an effectivelycoordinated defense. They had plenty of men and ships,
enough weapons to destroy half the galaxy, but they were crumpling before the
concentrated force of Jeff's attack.
After
a week, Jeff's men were dispersed over thousands of planets, with no serious
resistance in sight. No Masters had yet been found.
"It's all over,"
Terry said. "We've won."
I
disagreed. "There are still thousands of star systems in this cluster.
The Masters could be hiding an overwhelming force, waiting for us to spread
ourselves so thin.. . ."
Jeff
shook his head. "I don't think so, Alan. They can't afford to give up all
the important communications and manufacturing centers we've taken. If they
were going to counterattack, they would have done it before this. A serious
battle now would tear this cluster apart, and they know it."
"We've
surprised them," Marsh said. "The cream of their fighting forces is
out there near the gap, waiting for us and wondering where we got to. They
never expected us here so soon. How could they imagine we'd jump across
twenty-five thousand light-years and hit their home base?"
After
a moment's thought, I had to agree. In the past months, impossibilities had
occurred so fast and often that we were all inclined to take them as commonplace.
"This
is what I hoped for," Jeff said, his dark eyes shining with intensity.
"Much more than I dared dream of, in fact. It's all over but. . . ."
The
viewscreen flashed on. A worried Star Watch officer appeared.
"Sir, we have a
delegation of Saurians here who are asking for clemency. They say some of our
men are deliberately wrecking their planet after they surrendered."
"What men?" Jeff
demanded.
"The Komani,
sir," the officer answered.
That galvanized Jeff into
action.
"I
was afraid of this," he said as his cruiser sped us to the trouble spot.
It
was a large planet, evidently an important commercial center, judging from the
many spaceports and warehouses we saw in the viewscreen. The planet's sun was a
dull red supergiant, large enough to swallow all the planets up to Mars if it
had been placed in Sol's position. A detachment of Komani warriors had been
dropped there by Terry's ships.
Much
of the planet was obscured by sullen gray smoke as the cruiser settled into a
tight orbit. Jeff and the three of us, together with a picked squad of Star
Watch men, transferred to a landing ship and flew down into the planet's
atmosphere.
From
this lower altitude we could see that many of the buildings were wrecked and
gutted by fire. Komani warriors were methodically pillaging the planet, taking
what they wanted and destroying what they did not take.
Then
we found a large open plaza, and at one end of it sat Tamar Kang and his
chieftains, while warriors filed past, depositing half their loot.
Jeff's
face was tense as he put on his helmet and buckled a gun to his waist.
"Set us down in that plaza," he told the pilot.
"That's
a little tight for a ship this size, sir," the pilot said.
"I know."
We landed, settling tailfirst at the far end
of the plaza. By the time we had gotten out of the ship, the Komani procession
had stopped. The warriors were grouped in a ragged half-circle, flanking the
chieftains and Tamar Kang.
Jeff walked straight to the
giant leader.
"I
told you that as long as you were under my command there would be no
looting."
Kang
smiled, as gray smoke drifted through the shattered building behind him.
"The war is over. To the victor goes the spoils."
"You
have not been released from my command," Jeff snapped.
"When
I first met you," Kang said, seemingly ignoring Jeff's words, "you
were wearing a Komani sword which you claimed to have taken from a warrior that
you killed. There cannot be two leaders of the Komani. One of us must make way
for the other. Will you fight me for the right to rule?"
Jeff
looked about. The lurid red sunlight filtering through the pall of smoke, the
wrecked buildings staring emptily onto the plaza, the ranks of men standing
tensely, waiting for a signal to leap into battle, everything about the scene
had a somber nightmarish quality to it.
"Give me a
sword," Jeff said.
One
of the chieftains handed him a Komani broadsword, and Jeff walked back a few
paces with us.
"Jeff,"
Terry protested, "he's too big and strong for you. He can handle that
sword as though it were a wand. You practically need both hands just to swing
it."
"I can't back down, either," Jeff
said, "without getting everyone here embroiled in a fight. They outnumber us three to one
at the moment."
He
turned and faced Tamar Kang, who was standing, armed and ready. "If I
don't make it," Jeff said, "you challenge him, Terry."
From
the first motions Tamar Kang made, it was evident that this would be no fencing
match such as Jeff was accustomed to. Kang rushed in, swinging his mighty
weapon in terrifying arcs, trying to use his size and weight advantage to its
fullest, while keeping Jeff's superior agility and reflexes at a minimum.
Sparks
flew from the clashing blades as the Komani giant pressed a slashing, ever-mounting
attack. Jeff gave ground, attempted to thrust in on his opponent between those
savage swings, but he could not get close enough before another mighty sweep of
Tamar Kang's blade would force him to parry.
Kang
was trying to overpower Jeff, to knock the sword from his hands, push him
off-balance, break through the Terran's guard in any way he could. One solid
blow with that diamond-sharpened blade would smash any living thing.
Jeff
was constantly forced back, edging his way across the gutted plaza, almost
stumbling over debris as he got closer and closer to the walls of the buildings.
Kang's strength was beginning to tell, Jeff s guard was dropping lower, and his
parries were coming later with each of the Komani's powerful slashes.
And
then he smashed through Jeff's guard with a mighty overhand sweep, knocking
Jeff's helmet off and sending him spinning, half-stumbling into the wall.
In
the flash of an instant I saw it all: Kang crouched for his final spring, Jeff
sprawled against the wall, blood trickling across his forehead and down his cheek, both arms down,
gasping hard for breath.
But
on Jeff's face, in that brief instant, I saw
the look he had worn during the worst moments of the Battle of the Gap. He was
facing death again, and he was mortally determined to conquer.
As
Kang leaped in on him, Jeff grasped his sword in both hands and met the
Komani's wild attack with a mighty swing of his own. Pushing outward from the
wall, Jeff met Tamar Kang's strength with strength, and forced the bigger man
back.
For
a moment Kang hesitated, and Jeff seized the attack. He swung two-handed,
slashing at his enemy with every ounce of might and will left in him.
Then
he ripped his blade in below Tamar Kang's guard, and as the sword swung up past
Jeff's shoulder, I could see blood on it. Kang stood immobile,
transfixed, staring at his small opponent, as Jeff brought his blade back with
a sickening thud against the side of Tamar Kang's skull.
The
Komani chieftain crumpled. Jeff stood there, staring at the man who had nearly
killed him, leaning on his stained sword, gasping for breath.
No one moved.
Jeff
looked up at the Komani warriors. "You heard what he said; now I am your chief. You will remain here on this planet until I decide where you will be moved."
As
we walked back to the ship, Jeff said, "We'd better get the
anthropologists to find some home for the Komani and settle them down
peacefully, with the least possible damage to their racial character. They're
too bloodthirsty to be allowed free run of the galaxy."
Weeks passed, and we spread our forces
through the entire globular cluster. News from Morenia and die Confederation
arrived: the Saurian fighting forces were collapsing everywhere. The war was
ended.
But still we found no
Masters.
And
then Jeff received a report from a team of scientists who had found what
looked as though it might have been the Masters' original homeworld. It was a
dead, airless planet circling an almost inert dwarf star. The planet was so old
that there was no trace of radioactivity anywhere on its surface or as deep
into its interior as the scientists' scanners could probe. There were cities on
the planet so perfectly preserved that the archeologists could not even guess
how old they were.
And the cities were built
by and for humans.
Everything
else in the cluster had been built to Saurian standards, for use by Saurians.
Jeff and I sped there.
We
spent several days walking through the dark airless, long-dead cities in our
spacesuits. The buildings were not of impressive size, and the cities themselves
were nowhere near as large as the megalopolises of Earth.
But
the whole planet had a dismal foreboding to it, a sense of antiquity beyond all
human comprehension.
"This
was once a planet like Earth," I heard Jeff's voice in my helmet
earphones. We were prowling through a large, single-roomed building, piercing
its gloomy darkness with our helmet lights; it might have been an ancient
theater or temple.
"Once
men like us lived and worked and built here," Jeff continued. "But
time itself must have forgotten how long ago."
"You will know
someday."
"What
did you say, Alan?" Jeff asked. But I had not spoken.
Jeff
realized it just as I did. We looked at each other.
"Someday
you will find the answers to all your questions."
We
turned to the far end of the room. A man was sitting atop a raised
platform—perhaps it was once a stage. And he wore no spacesuit.
"You
have sought the Masters over half the galaxy," I heard this voice in my
earphones. "I am one of them."
We
were both too stunned to move.
"I
have only a few moments to stay here. My purpose is to answer some of your
questions. Not all, but some."
Jeff
and I decided, long afterward, that we could not make out the details of his
face. At this distance we could not even be sure his lips were moving. His
whole body seemed to be aglow, shimmering with light.
"You
young primates have come charging halfway across the galaxy to exterminate us,
eh? Well, it is not that easy. Oh, you have won the war, never fear. You won it
with your first battle ... at Epsilon
Orionis, as you call it. We should have realized then that we were too old and
too tired to push a full-scale war against you hot-blooded barbarians."
His voice seemed half-amused, half-sorrowful. "Do you know what you have
won?"
"The
galaxy," Jeff answered.
"By
the pulse of the cosmos, no! Half the galaxy . . . closer to three-fifths. More
than eighty billion star systems, if that excites you. That is your prize,
your reward for youth,
for strength and daring. And do you know what the price you must pay will
be?" Jeff shook his head.
The
voice grew grim. "Responsibility. For all the ages since the dawn of
history, the Masters have controlled an ever-increasing domain of star systems
and the intelligent beings that inhabit them. Now that control is shattered.
At this moment, commerce throughout our wide domain is at a standstill. Fear
and panic, the horrible aftermath of war, are rampant. It is your
responsibility to restore order. Unless you can prove that you are more than
barbarians, people you have never heard of will starve ... by the trillions."
"You
make it sound as though it's our fault," Jeff said.
"Is
it not?" the voice demanded, and the shimmering body stirred on its
improvised throne. "Have you not wrecked the government of the galaxy? Did
you not ruin the system of providing for all peoples ... a system that was
working well when your planet was still perpetually cloud-covered and its only
pretense to life was a few lichen? It is your
fault!"
"But
you attacked us," Jeff insisted. "We were merely defending
ourselves."
"Your defense has
ruined half the galaxy."
"But that's just as
much your fault as ours."
The
man seemed to shrug. "Perhaps," the voice said. "Who can be
totally free of the blame for war?"
"But why did you
attack us?" Jeff asked.
"Would
you quick-tempered Terrans have accepted our civilization if we offered it to
you?'*
"No,
we have our own civilization. We fought to preserve it."
"We knew you would," the voice
said. "And we knew that our only chance of absorbing you into our domain
was to defeat you militarily. Unfortunately, we were disastrously overconfident
of our military strength. Still, if you had not roused your people. . .."
"Why
didn't you leave us alone instead of attacking us?"
The
voice darkened. "Because we are an ancient, ancient race, and we have
always won our wars. We could not leave you alone because you were young and
virile. Given two or three more generations, and you would have attacked us. We
had to conquer and absorb you quickly, before you conquered us. In the end it
did not matter, did it?"
"Where are the others
of your race?"
"Gone,
my young conqueror . , . fled to safe havens. As I said, we are an old race.
There are only a few million of us left. We will scatter through the galaxy and
settle on unpopulated planets near hot blue stars. Some of us will leave the
galaxy altogether. You will never hear from us again. In a way, we are glad
that someone younger and stronger is taking over the reins. The responsibility
is yours. The Saurians will serve you, just as they have served us, but the
burden of managing half the galaxy will still be yours."
The Master rose from his
chair.
"Wait!"
Jeff called. "There's so much I have to know. . . ."
"I
said I would answer some of your questions. I will not answer them all."
"Answer
one more: Are you the Others? The race that nearly wiped out Terran humanity a
million years ago?"
He seemed to smile. "I knew you would
ask that. No, we are not the Others you seek. They came from outside the galaxy
and attacked many star systems along the rim in your area. Our domain did not
reach that far in those days, but the Others marched across the galaxy to us.
We fought a monumental battle, at the place you now call the Gap. The Others
defeated us, but we retreated and destroyed the stars as we left them behind.
The Others decided that they would not profit from this, and left us in peace.
"They
returned to finish destroying your people. Perhaps that should have been our
clue. When faced with the alternatives of destroying you or us, the Others
turned on you. Probably they knew that you would turn out to be the stronger
race. Whoever they were, they came from another galaxy and have never
returned."
He
stepped away from the chair. "And now I must leave."
"I'm not sure I'll let
you," Jeff said.
"Young
fool," the voice taunted. "Have you no eyes? Do you realize that what
you see is not my natural form? Can a human breathe in vacuum? Have you not yet
learned that we exist on pure energy radiated from the hot, young blue stars?
Yes, once we were human, but long ages ago we outgrew that form. Fear not, you
will never see us again. The galaxy is yours, little conqueror ... I wish you more success with it than we
had."
And
then his form seemed to coalesce into a brilliant, blinding sphere of light
that shot upward and out of sight, going through the ceiling without disturbing
a single atom of its unbroken expanse.
Jeff stared at the ceiling for several
moments, then turned to me. Even through the visor of his spacesuit I could see
the wonder in his eyes.
"Those
six ships directing the Saurians at the Gap ..
. they weren't ships at all!"
And
there, really, the story of the star conquerors ends. The Masters turned over
their empire to the Terrans ... to
Jeff.
It
was inevitable that Jeff would become the leader in peace as well as war. At
every turn he had been the man in charge, the one who saw farther and more
clearly than all the rest of us.
It
had been Jeff who saw the need of an outright attack on the Masters' invasion
bases near the Confederation. His skill and leadership had won the pivotal
battle at Epsilon Orionis; his insights into races strange to us had led to the
Komani and humankind additions to his force; his quick thinking and raw courage
won the Battle of the Gap; his keen, certain instincts had led him to gamble
the course of the war on Marsh's new navigational technique.
And
now, through more than half the galaxy, from Sol to the Masters' cluster,
Geoffrey Knowland was being proclaimed the Galactic Coordinator. The Terran
Confederation made Jeff Star Watch Chief Coordinator and a Council member, the
first time any one man had held both posts. Morenia and the other humankind
planets hailed him as overlord, although he told them they must fully develop
their own internal governments.
Regretfully,
Jeff accepted the inevitable. He knew that he was not a conqueror, but a
captive, and in seeking Terra's freedom he had surrendered his own to the
endless tasks of administrating the vast domain the Masters had left behind.
"And
the Others are still as mysterious and far away as ever," he told me
ruefully.
Jeff
had his galaxy map taken from his cruiser and installed in one of the buildings
in the Masters' cluster which the Saurians had converted to his use. His dream
of exploring the farthest reaches of the galaxy were gone now; he would remain
at his desk while men like Marsh and Terry made the explorations.
Now
I am sailing back to the Terran Confederation. Rh'khour'mnin has been
liberated, I know, and some day I will visit my people. But now my place is
with Jeff, helping him.
He
has sent me to the Confederation to report to the Council for him. Already he
is far too busy to leave the Galactic capital.
On my return, I am to bring
three people with me.
Renata,
his mother; she will visit the son who has put his tremendous energies to a
task far greater than even she could envision nearly two years ago.
Dr.
Lee, his teacher; his knowledge and ability to teach will be invaluable to Jeff
in his new duties.
And
Tavia, the girl he loves; she, more than anyone, is the person Jeff cannot do
without. With her beside him, no burden will be too great, no task too
difficult.
The
war is over, the battles ended, and—as always— the intricate, unending tasks of
peace will be far more laborious than the quick, emotion-charged decisions of
war.
But—as
always—the future promises much more than die past has shown.
Atout the Author
Ben Bova is a graduate of Temple University
in Philadelphia. He obtained his degree in journalism, and was for a time an
editor of the Upper
Darby News in
Upper Darby, Pennsylvania.
He
has been a Technical Editor for Project Vanguard with the Martin Company in
Baltimore, and is now a screenwriter for the Physical Science Study Committee
of Educational Services, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mr. Bova is an enthusiastic amateur
astronomer, and did a great deal of stellar map-making and astronomical
research while writing The Star Conquerors.
He and his wife and young
son, Michael, make their home in a suburb of Boston.