TODAY THIS STAR, TOMORROW THE UNIVERSE!
After four centuries of space travel, man had
explored and colonized every inhabitable world within a radius of four hundred
light-years. Not a trace of any other intelligent life had ever been sighted.
It seemed as if the universe belonged solely to mankind.
Thus
the sudden discovery of another, more advanced race already busy colonizing
far-off planets shook the very foundations of human feelings of superiority.
But
deflated egos weren't the only problem. Man was determined to continue
spreading outwards, and the aliens obstinately had the same plans. What could
prevent the inevitable clash of the two stellar empires and the oncoming of
destruction to all their worlds?
Turn
this book over for second complete novel
ROBERT
SILVERBERG is
a native New Yorker who has carved out a career for himself as a full-time
professional writer. An active science-fiction fan in his teens, he undertook
the writing of a juvenile interplanetary novel while in his sophomore year at
Columbia University. To his own surprise, it was accepted and published. This
decided the course of his future.
After
receiving his B.A. in English Literature, he married a fellow student who had
just received her B.S. in Physics, settled down and got to work writing. He has
sold well over a million words in short stories, novelettes, and book-length
novels.
Ace Books have published a number of his
novels, of which the following are still available: THE THIRTEENTH IMMORTAL
(D-223), MASTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (D-237), and INVADERS FROM EARTH (D-286).
COLLISION COURSE
by
ROBERT SILVERBERG
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36,
N.Y.
collision course
Copyright ©,
1961, by Robert Silverberg
Copyright, 1959, by Ziff-Dgvis Publishing Co. An Ace Book, by arrangement with Thomas
Bouregy & Co. AU
Rights Reserved
To Leo
and Noma
Brown—with thanks.
the nemesis from terra
Copyright ©, 1961, by Ace Books, Inc. Printed
in U.S.A.
ONE
Only
a month before, the
Technarch McKenzie had calmly sent five men to probable death in the name of
Terran progress. But now, it seemed, those five men had not really died after
all, and McKenzie's normally rock-hard face reflected inner tension and the
strain of anticipation.
The
message, reaching him in the Archonate Center, had been brief to the point of
curtness. "Luna
detection center reports return to this system of the XV-ftl. Landing at
Central Australia spaceport requested for 1200 hours EST."
The
Technarch read the message through twice, nodding, even permitting himself the
luxury of a slow smile. So they were back, were they? After a
successful trip? By
the Hammer, he
thought, we'll
see men in the far galaxies yet! And in
my Archonate, heaven willing!
His
nature was too stern to allow him more than a moment of gloating pride. He had
gambled; he had won; and perhaps his name would ring in the galleries of
history for millennia. No matter about that, though. The experimental
faster-than-light ship was returning safely. It behooved him, as Terra's
Technarch, to be present at the landing.
He
depressed a communicator stud. "Set up a transmat connection to the
Central Australia spaceport right away, Naylor. Immediate
departure."
"At once,
Excellency."
McKenzie
stared for a moment at the big, thick fingers of his hands as they lay before
him on the desk. Hands like those could never wire a circuit, wield a surgeon's
excising vibro-knife, or tune the fine controls on a thermonuclear generator.
But they were hands that could choke the life from a man, and they were hands
that could write, "If
we remain bound
forever to the limiting velocity of light, we will
be as snails seeking to cross a continent. We must not be lulled into complacency
by the slow expansion of our colonial empire. We must surge ever outward; and
the faster-than-light spacedrive must be the be-all and end-all of our research
effort."
He
had written those words fifteen years earlier, in 2765, and delivered them as
his first public address after his accession to the Archonate.
And,
fifteen years later, a ship had gone to the stars and returned in less than a
month. Perhaps. There was always the chance that they
had traveled no farther than the orbit of Pluto, broken down and limped back
home. He would find out soon enough.
Rising,
McKenzie traversed the gleaming marble floor of his private chamber—a shameful
extravagance, he had always thought in his dour way, but the chamber had not
been designed with his tastes in mind—and passed through the irising
sphincter into his transmat cubicle.
Naylor
waited there, an obsequious little man in the stiff black robe of the
Technarch's personal staff. "The coordinates are set, Excellency."
"Have you been through
it?"
"Of
course, Excellency. I have tested it twice."
"Good enough. Leave
the field open for my return."
McKenzie
stepped forward. The lambent green transmat field pulsed up from the floor
aperture, forming a curtain dividing the cubicle in two. The hidden power
generators of the transmat were linked directly to the main generator that spun
endlessly on its poles somewhere beneath the Atlantic, condensing the theta
force that made transmat travel possible. McKenzie did not bother to check the
coordinates Naylor had set. Call it an act of faith; the Technarch was
supremely confident that no one schemed .his
assassination. A minor abscissa distortion, and the
Technarch's atoms would be scattered to the cold winds. He stepped into the
glow of green without stopping to examine the coordinates.
There
was no sensation. The Technarch McKenzie was destroyed, a stream of tagged
wavicles was hurled halfway across a world, and the Technarch McKenzie was
reconstituted. If the moment of destruction had been longer, the
6
pain
would have been unbearable. But the transmat field ripped the Technarch's body
molecule from molecule in so tiny a fragment of a micro-second that his neural
system could not possibly have relayed the pain; and the restoration to life
came with equal speed. Whole and undamaged, McKenzie stepped through the field
and out, almost instantly later, in the transmat cubicle at Central Australia spaceport,
in what once had been the barren Gibson Desert
and which now harbored Earth's largest spacefield.
It
had been shortly before noon in New York; here, it was early the following
morning. A wall clock read 0213 hours. McKenzie left the transmat cubicle.
They
spotted him at once; the Technarch's toweringly commanding figure was a familiar sight here, and they came running to greet him. They were a
tense lot. McKenzie smiled a Technarch's
greeting at Daviot and Leeson, who had developed the warp-drive that powered
the experimental ship; at Herbig, the spaceport commandant; at Jesperson, the
coordinator of faster-than-light research.
McKenzie asked,
"What's the news from the ship?"
Jesperson
grinned boyishly. "They sent the all-okay signal five minutes ago. They're
in a deceleration orbit, coming down on rocket
drive, and they'll make touchdown at 0233 hours."
"How
about their trip?"
Leeson
said in his rumbling basso, "It seems they made it Out and back."
"We don't know that
for sure," Daviot objected.
McKenzie scowled.
"Make up your minds."
Daviot
said, "All we know is that they quote switched from warp-drive to
plasma-drive some time last evening near the orbit of Jupiter, unquote."
"Doesn't
that mean that the warp-drive was a success?" Leeson demanded.
"All it means," said Daviot
pedantically, "is that they succeeded in converting from one kind of
drive to another. It doesn't mean that the warp-drive necessarily took them anywhere."
"No, but..
"AH right, quiet!" Jesperson said, as if detecting the grow-
7
ing
annoyance on the Technarch's face. "We'll find out the story in twenty
minutes."
"But
the Technarch wanted to know . . ." Daviot began, and let the sentence
come to a dying fall.
McKenzie
turned away. They were near the roof of a great transparent dome that covered
hundreds of acres. Outside, on the spacefield, the temperature was stifling
even now, in the morning's small hours. Within, silent conditioners maintained a more livable climate.
The Technarch looked up and out. The clear
desert air, utterly transparent, yielded a magnificent view of the heavens.
Stars speckled the black sky like gleaming jewels; above, the full moon cast
its brightness over the field. Men raced busily over the field's seared
surface, readying it for the ship that was plunging down toward Australia from
the sky.
McKenzie
felt a constriction in his throat, another in the pit of his stomach. It
irritated him to be so tense, but no stem command could relax him.
In
twenty minutes—nineteen—eighteen—the XV-ftl would
be returning.
He looked at the stars. Hundreds, thousands
of them, sprinkled across the sky. Every star within a radius of four hundred light-years that bore a habitable planet—and that
was most of them—had been reached by humanity. For centuries now, ships
traveling at nine-tenths of the speed of light had coursed outward to the
stars, prisoned by the limiting velocity but still capable of eating up the
parsecs, given enough time. It had taken six years to make the first one-way
trip to the Centauri system; the return, via transmat, was all but
instantaneous.
But
you had to reach the stars before you could plant the transmat pickup there,
and that was the stumbling-block. Ever outward, by little hops, the empire of
Man expanded— but always hampered by the inexorable mathematical limits of the
known universe. Once a planet could be reached and linked in the
interstellar transmat network, it was as close to Earth as any other point
within the network. The transmat gave infinite connectivity—once the link had
been established. But until then . . .
So progress had been slow. After better than
four centuries
8
of
interstellar travel, mankind had colonized every habitable world within a
sphere of four hundred light-years' radius. It was reasonable to assume that
the pattern of that sphere held true for the rest of the galaxy: at least one
habitable but uninhabited Earth-type planet round every mainsequence sun. No
other intelligent life-form had ever been discovered; the universe belonged to
man—but it would be millennia before man could take possession.
That
fact had irked McKenzie during his years of training for the Archonate; and
when the death of Technarch Beng-strom raised McKenzie to the dais, he bent all
of Earth's energies to the task of devising some means of cheating the chains
of relativity.
There
were failures, expensive ones. Test ships had been sent out and monitored and
followed by manned ships, and the manned ships had exploded or never returned.
And still there were volunteers for the next ship, and the next, and the one
after that. . . .
Until the advent of Daviot-Leeson Drive, with its incredibly slender
generator smashing a hole in space-time by controlled thermonuclear thrusts—and
suddenly the way seemed clear. Space in the region of a star, reasoned Daviot and Leeson, is warped
and distorted by the star's mass and heat. If only the same effect could be
duplicated in miniature, if only a wedge could be opened in the space-time
fabric wide enough for a ship to slip through, travel a predetermined course,
and return—then man's dominion would be boundless.
It
took six years from the first pilot models to the confidence that allowed
McKenzie to send a manned ship to the stars. And now it was returning—in
thirteen minutes, twelve, eleven. Minutes ticked
tensely away, no one spoke. Jesperson, wearing headphones, was in contact with
the main monitoring station at the far end of the field.
At
five minutes before touchdown time Jesperson said, "They've sighted it
clear and sharp. It'll be here right on time."
McKenzie
moistened his lips, turning away so the others would not see a hint of tension
on the Technarch's face. Four minutes. Three. Two.
Jesperson was relaying the final countdown,
and then the XV-ftl
was there, arching down in
a golden stream of flame, coming to rest in front of them, lowering its
landing-jacks and stabilizers. The decontamination crew was swabbing down the
field; the hatch was opening.
Men came forth.
Technarch
McKenzie counted them. One, two, three, four, five. No
casualties, then. At this distance, nearly a thousand yards, he could not make
out individual faces; but five had gone to the stars, and five had returned.
Their names formed a sort of jingle in the Technarch's mind. Laurance, Peterszoon, Nakamura, Clive,
Hernandez. Hernandez, Clive, Nakamura, Peterszoon, Laurance. Laurance,
Peterszoon, Nakamura. . .
They
were trudging across the field now toward the dome. As they came closer,
McKenzie observed that three of them had grown beards. He remembered the day he
had stood in this very room with them, making farewells that he quietly
believed would be final ones. But they had returned.
The
Technarch said to Jesperson, "Have the men brought up here right
away."
"Hearkening,
Excellency," Jesperson gabbled into a phone. Moments later, the door
irised open and the crew of the XV-ftl entered:
Laurance, Peterszoon, Nakamura, Clive, and Hernandez.
They
looked tired, sallow-faced, sweaty. The beards belonged
to Laurance, Peterszoon, and Clive. Nakamura's face was clean-shaven, but his
black hair hung dankly over his ears. Only Hernandez looked completely
well-groomed. But all five men had the same weary, overstrung look.
McKenzie
walked briskly toward them; his big hand seized Laurance's limp, moist one.
"Welcome back, Commander. All of you,
welcome."
"Obedience,
Excellency. It's—good to be back."
"It was a successful
trip?"
An
expression of doubt crept into Laurance's bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes.
"Successful? Well, I suppose. The drive worked beautifully. We covered
ninety-eight hundred light-years in the snap of a finger. But. . ."
Daviot
whooped jubilandy. Leefson slapped Jesperson on the back. McKenzie said
crisply, "But what?"
Laurance looked around the room.
"It's—it's kind of classified, Technarch McKenzie. Maybe we'd better wait
till later . . ."
"You
can speak in the presence of these men," McKenzie said.
"All
right, then. We had a smooth trip. We ducked in and out of hyperspace and came
out just where we wanted to be, and we got back home the same way. Only we met
some aliens out there."
"You met aliens?"
"Not
really met. We saw them,
and got the deuce away from there before they saw us. They were building a
city, Excellency. It looked as if—as if they were colonizing that planet, just
as we would do."
TWO
Form
hours later the entire Archonate convened at Archonate Center in an
extraordinary meeting called by McKenzie. The thirteen men who ruled Earth and
her network of dependent worlds foregathered in the Long Room, on the
hundred-and-ninth story of the Center building.
They
had come from every part of the world, summoned from their individual duties by
McKenzie's call, arraying themselves in their traditional places along the
rectangular table. In the center of the table sat the Geoarch, old Ronholm,
nominal first among the thirteen equals who comprised the Archonate. To
Ronholm's right sat the Technarch McKenzie. At the Georach's left was Wissiner,
Arcon of Communications. At Wissiner's side of the table were Nelson, Archon
of Education; Heimrich, Archon of Agriculture; Vornik, Archon of Health;
Lestrade, Archon of Security; Dawson, Archon of Finance. To the right of
McKenzie sat Klaus, Archon of Defense; Chang, Archon of the Colonies; Santelli,
Archon of Transportation; Minek, Archon of Housing; Croy, Archon of Power.
As
the Archon of technology, science, and research, McKenzie was the most
important man in the room, but he observed protocol scrupulously; he permitted
Geoarch Ron-holm the first word.
"We
have been called together into extraordinary session," the old man
quavered, "to hear of matters the Technarch considers of prime importance
to the future welfare of our worlds. I relinquish the chair to the Archon of
Technological Development."
McKenzie
spoke without rising. "Members of the Archon-ate, four hours ago a
spaceship landed in Australia after completing a journey of nearly ten thousand
fight-years in less than a month—and of that month, better than three weeks
were spent in exploration. The actual interstellar trip was virtually
instantaneous. That would normally be occasion for great rejoicing; for now,
the stars lie within the reach of us all, within our lifetimes. But there is a
complicating factor. I call now on Dr. John Laurance, Commander of the XV-ftl which returned a short while ago, to explain the nature of this factor
to us all."
McKenzie
gestured, and Laurance rose, a thin, tall figure, in the center of the room.
The five crewmen of the faster-than-light ship sat facing the Archons, looking
upward toward them as they sat at the dais.
The
five had, so they said, been without sleep for better than thirty-six hours;
but the Technarch had seen fit to call the extraordinary session of the
Archonate at once, and so there had been no chance for Laurance and his men to
rest. They had merely had time to trim their beards and hair, wash, and treat
themselves with anti-fatigue stimulants, before getting the call to the Long
Room.
Laurance
came forward until he was within twenty feet of the Archons. He showed no great
awe, merely the normal respect. He was a man of forty, with close-cropped hair
just turning a grizzled gray, and a lean, bony face which just now reflected
the many tensions of his recent trip. His eyes, pale gray, had a warm softness
about them that belied the triphammer quickness of his mind and the catlike
muscularity of his body.
He said carefully, in a deep, solemn voice,
"Excellencies,
12
I
was chosen by you to command the first manned Daviot-Leeson interstellar ship.
I left Earth on the First of Fivemonth past, with my crew of four whom you see
here. Traveling at a constant velocity of interplanetary rate, we reached the
orbit of Pluto, the assigned safety zone, and converted to the Daviot-Leeson
drive there.
"We
left the 'normal' universe at a distance
of some forty astronomical units from the Earth and followed our pre-calculated
course for seventeen hours, until reaching our intended position. Making use
of the Daviot-Leeson drive once again, we returned to the 'normal' universe and
found that we had indeed reached our goal, the star NGCR 185143 at a mean distance of approximately ninety-eight hundred light-years from
Earth.
"This
star is a G-type main sequence sun with eleven planets. Following our
instructions, we made landing on the fourth of these planets, which was
Earthtype to six places and thus suitable for colonization. To our great
surprise, we found that a city was in the process of construction on this
planet."
At
the dais, McKenzie scowled. Laurance's narration so far had been utterly flat,
schematic, synoptic; the man had managed to strip away all the wonder of the
first interstellar f-t-1 flight and turn it into a -mechanical report, the Technarch thought in irritation.
He said, "Tell us
about the aliens you saw."
"Yes, Excellency. I despatched my crewmen Hernandez and Clive to reconnoiter. They observed the aliens for several hours."
"Unnoticed?"
McKenzie asked.
"So far as is
known," replied Laurance.
"What
were these aliens like?" asked the Archon of Defense, Klaus, in his thin,
testy voice.
"Humanoid,
Excellencies. We have photographs of them which would have been available for
display had we—had we been given sufficient notice to prepare them. They stand
about two meters in height, are two-legged, oxygen-breathing, and in many
respects are much like ourselves. Skin pigmentation is green, though some
observed aliens were blue. They appear to have a somewhat more complex joint structure
13
than we
do; their arms are double-elbowed, permitting motion in all directions, and as
best as we could see at a distance they seem to have seven or perhaps eight
fingers. Opposable thumbs, of course. They wear clothing. In brief, they seem
to be an intelligent and energetic race of about the same stage of evolutionary
development as we ourselves are."
The
Archon of Security asked quiedy, "Are you certain you were not
observed?"
"They
paid no outward attention to our ship. At all times my men remained hidden
while observing them. After two hours of observation we left the fourth planet
and proceeded to the third, which was also Earthtype and likewise was
undergoing construction of a colony. From there we proceeded by warp-drive to
a star two light-years away, where similar colonization was taking place. A
third visit, seven light-years farther, showed yet another alien colony being
built. We concluded from this that a substantial colonial movement is being
carried on by these people in their sector of space. After our visit to the
third stellar system, we left on our homeward journey and arrived several hours
ago."
"We're
not alone, then," said Geoarch Ronholm, half
to himself. "Other beings out there, building
their colonies too..."
"Yes,"
interrupted McKenzie crisply. "Building their colonies
too. I submit that we've stumbled over the greatest threat to Earth in
our entire history."
"Why
do you say that?" asked Nelson, the Archon of Education, with some fervor.
"Just because another species ten thousand light-years away is settling a
few worlds, Technarch, you can't really draw dire conclusions."
"I
can, and I am. Today the Terran sphere of worlds and the alien sphere are
thousands of light-years apart. But we're expanding constantly, even forgetting
the new space-drive for the moment, and so are they. It's a collision course.
Not a collision between spaceships, or planets, or even suns; it's an inevitable
collision between two stellar empires, theirs and ours."
"Have you a
proposal?" the Geoarch asked.
"I have," McKenzie said.
"We'll have to contact these people at once. Not a hundred years from now,
not next year, but next week. We'll have to show them that we're in
14
the
universe, too—and that some kind of accord is going to have to be reached—before the collision comesl"
There
was a ringing moment of silence. McKenzie stared forward, at the standing
figure of Laurance flanked by his four crewmen.
"How
do you know," asked Security Archon Lestrade, "that these—aliens—have
any hostile intent at all?"
"Intent
of hostility is irrelevant. They exist; we exist. They colonize their area; we,
ours. We're headed for a collision."
"Make
your recommendation, Technarch McKenzie," the Geoarch said mildly.
McKenzie
rose. "I recommend that the newly returned faster-than-light ship be sent
out once again, this time carrying a staff of negotiators who will contact the
aliens. The negotiators will attempt to discover the purposes of these beings
and to arrive at a cooperative entente, in
which certain areas of the galaxy will be reserved for one or the other of the
colonizing races."
"Who's
going to pilot the ship this time?" asked the Archon of Communication.
McKenzie
looked surprised. "Why, we have a trained crew with us today who have
proved their capabilities."
"They've
just returned from a month-long expedition," Archon Wissiner protested.
"These men have relatives, families. You can't send them out again
immediately!"
"Would
it be better to risk our one completed faster-than-light ship by putting it in
the hands of inexperienced men?" McKenzie asked. "If the Archonate
approves, I will present before the end of the day a list of those men I think
are suited for treating with the aliens. Once they have been assembled, the
ship can leave at once. I leave the matter in your hands."
McKenzie
returned to his seat. A brief, spiritless debate followed; although several of
the Archons privately resented the sometimes high-handed methods of the
Technarch, they rarely dared to block his will when it came to a vote. McKenzie
had been proved right too often in the past for anyone to go against him now.
He
sat quietly, listening to the discussion and taking part in it only when it was
necessary to defend some point. His
15
features reflected none of the bitterness that had
welled up within him since the return of the XV-ftl. The homecoming had been ruined for him.
Aliens
building colonies, he
thought bleakly. The shiny toy that was the universe was thus permanently
tarnished in the Technarch's mind. He had dreamed of a universe of waiting
planets, through which mankind could spread like a swiftly flowing river. But
that was not to be; after hundreds of years, another species had been
encountered. Equals? It seemed that way—if no worse. Whatever their
capabilities, it meant that mankind now was limited, that some or perhaps all of the universe now was barred to them. And in that
respect Mo Kenzie himself felt diminished.
There
was nothing to do but negotiate, to salvage some portion of infinity for the
empire of Earth. McKenzie sighed. The man best fitted for the task of
ambassador to the aliens was himself. But Terran law forbade an Archon to leave
Earth; only by renouncing the Archonate could he accompany the negotiating
team—and that renunciation would be impossible for McKenzie to embrace.
He
waited, impatient in his seat, for the debate to wind on to its predetermined
end. They would have to give in. But not yet.
Not
until Dawson had finished demanding if this extension of mankind past the
boundaries of the present sphere was financially wise; not until Wissiner was
through questioning the wisdom of the negotiation; not until Croy had exhausted
the objection that perhaps the aliens were expanding in the other direction; not until Klaus had finished suggesting in a veiled way that
immediate war, and not negotiation, was the clearest course.
It
went down the table that way, each man ridding himself of his private phantom, while the five spacemen, weary and travelwom, were treated
to the unusual spectacle of watching Earth's ruling oligarchy quarrel. At
length the Geoarch said in his quavering, uncertain voice, "I call for the
vote."
The
vote took place. Each Archon operated a concealed switch beneath his section of
the table. To the right for support of the measure, to the
left for opposition. Above the table, a gleaming globe registered the
secret tally. White was
16
the
color of acceptance, black that of defeat. McKenzie was the first to throw his
switch; a swirl of pure white danced in the mottled gray depths of the globe.
An instant later a spear of black lanced through the white—Wissiner's vote,
McKenzie wondered?—and then another white, another black. Gray predominated,
swirling inconclusively. The hue leaned now toward the white, now to the black.
Sweat beaded the Technarch's forehead. The color grew light as votes were
shifted.
At
last the globe displayed the pure white of unanimity. The Geoarch said,
"The proposal is approved. Technarch McKenzie will prepare plans for negotiating
mission and present them to us for our approval. This meeting is adjourned
until reconvened by the Technarch."
Rising,
McKenzie made his way down from the dais and walked toward the five spacemen
muttering uncertainly to each other in the center of the room. As he
approached, one of them—it was Peterszoon, the big blonde—glared at him with an
expression of unmistakable hatred.
"May
we go now, Excellency?" Laurance asked, obviously keeping himself under
tight leash.
"One
moment. I'd
like to have a word."
"Of
course, Excellency."
McKenzie
forced his grave features to contort into the unfamiliar pattern of a smile.
"I didn't come over to apologize; but I want to say that I know you boys
deserve a vacation, and I'm sorry you can't have one yet. Earth needs you to
take that ship out. You're the best we have; that's why you have to go."
He
eyed the five of them—Laurance, Peterszoon, Nakamura, Clive, Hernandez.
Half-throttled anger smouldered in their eyes. They were defiant; they 'had
every reason to be. But they could see beyond their own momentary rage.
Laurance
said, in his slow, deliberate way, "We'll have a day or two, won't we?"
"At
least that much," the Technarch said. "But as soon as the negotiators
are gathered, you'll have to go."
"How
many men will you pick? The ship can't hold much more than nine or ten."
"I won't name many men. A linguist, a diplomat, a couple
17
of
biophysicists and sociologists. You'll have enough room." The technarch
smiled again. "I know it's a lousy trick to send you out on another trip
right after you've come back. But I know you understand. And—if it's worth
anything to you—you'll have a Technarch's gratitude for going." It was as
far as McKenzie could lower himself toward being an ordinary human being. The
smile slowly left his face, and he nodded a stiff salute and turned away.
Laurance and his men would go. Now to pick the negotiating
team.
THREE
Dr.
Martin Bernard
was at his ease, that
evening, - in his South Kensington flat just off the Cromwell Road. Outside his
window drifted London's murky Sixmonth fog; but Martin Bernard took no notice
of that. His windows were opaqued; within the flat, all was cozy, warm, and
snug, as he liked it. Ancient music tinkled softly down from the overhead sonic
screen: Bach, it was, a harpischord piece. He had the
volume control set for minimal audibility, just above the hearing threshold.
That way, the Bach made no demands on his attention, but he sensed its
presence, gay and lilting.
Bernard
lay sprawled in his vibrochair, cradling a volume of Yeats on his lap while the
shoulder-lamp wriggled unhappily in its attempt to keep the beam focussed on
the page no matter how Bernard might alter his position. A flask of rare
brandy, twenty years old, imported from one of the Procyon worlds, was within
easy reach. Bernard had his drink, his music, his poetry, his warmth. What
better way, he asked himself, to relax after spending two hours trying to pound
the essentials of sociometrics into the heads of an obtuse clump of sophomores?
Even
as he relaxed, he felt a twinge of guilt at his comfort. Academic people were
not generally thought of as sybarites, but he told himself that he deserved this comfort. He was the
18
top man
in his field. He had, besides, written a successful novel. His poems were
highly esteemed and anthologized. He had struggled hard for his present
acclaim; now, at forty-three, with the problem of money solved forever and the
problem of his second marriage equally neatly disposed of, there was no reason
why he should not spend his evenings in this luxurious solitude.
He
smiled. Katha had divorced him: mental
cruelty, she had charged, though Bernard thought of himself as one of the least
cruel persons who had ever lived. It was simply that his teaching and his
writing and his own studies had left him with no time for his wife. She had
divorced him; so be it. He realized now, two marriages too late, that he had
not really been the marrying sort at all.
He
leaned back, thumbing through Yeats. A wonderful poet, Bernard thought; perhaps
the best of- the Late Medie-vals.
That
is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crotoded
seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born
and dies. Caught in that...
The
phone chimed, shattering the flow. Bernard scowled and elbowed himself to a
sitting position; putting down the book, he crossed to the phone cabinet and
thumbed the go-ahead button. He had never had an extension rigged that would
allow him to answer the phone without getting up. He was not yet sybarite
enough to carry on his conversations while flat on his back.
The
screen brightened; but instead of a face, the image of the Technarch's
coat-of-arms appeared. Frowning, Bernard stared at the yellow and blue emblem.
An impersonal voice said,
"Dr. Martin Bernard?"
"That's right."
"Technarch
McKenzie wished to speak to you. Are you alone?"
"Yes. I'm alone."
"Please apply unscrambler."
Bernard
lowered the toggle at the side of the phone. A moment later, the coat-of-arms gave way to the head and shoulders of the
Technarch himself. Bernard stared levelly at the strong, blocky-featured face
of McKenzie. He and the Technarch had met only a few times; McKenzie had decorated
him with the Order of Merit seven years back, and since then they had crossed
paths at several formal scientific functions. But he had heard the Technarch's
familiar booming voice on hundreds of state occasions. Now, Bernard inclined
his head respectfully and said, "Hearkening, Technarch."
"Good
evening, Dr. Bernard. Something unusual has arisen. I think you can help
me—help us all."
"If it's possible for
me to serve, Technarch . . ."
"It
is. We've sent an experimental faster-than-light ship out, Dr. Bernard. It
reached a system ten thousand light-years away. Intelligent colony-building
aliens were discovered. We have to negotiate a treaty with them. I want you to
head the negotiating team."
The
short, punchy sentences left Bernard dizzy. He followed the Technarch from one
startling statement to the next; the final sentence landed with the impact of a
blow.
"You
want—me—to head the negotiating team?" Bernard repeated dazedly.
"You'll
be accompanied by three other negotiators and a crew of five. The crew is
ready; I'm still waiting acceptance from some of the others. Departure will be
immediate. The transit time is negligible. The period of negotiation can be as
brief as you can make it. You could be back on Earth in less than a
month."
Bernard
felt an instant of vertigo. All seemed swallowed up: the book of poetry, the
brandy, the warmth, the snugness— all punctured in a moment by this
transatlantic call.
He
said in a hesitant voice, "Why—why am I picked for this assignment?"
"Because
you're the best of your profession," replied the Technarch simply.
"Can you free yourself of commitments for the next several weeks?'
"I—suppose so."
"I
have your acceptance, then, Dr. Bernard?" "I—yes,
Excellency. I accept."
Tour
service will not go unrewarded. Report to Archonate Center as
soon as is convenient, Doctor—and no later than tomorrow evening New York time.
You have my deepest gratitude, Dr. Bernard."
The
screen went blank.
Bernard gaped at the contracting dot of light
that had been the Technarch's face a moment before. He stared down suddenly at
the floor, dizzy. My
God, he thought. What have 1 let myself in for? An interstellar expedition!
Then he smiled ironically. The Technarch had
just offered him a chance to be one of the first human beings to meet
face-to-face with an intelligent non-terrestrial. And here he was, worrying
about a temporary separation from his piddling little comfortable nest. I ought to be celebrating, he thought, not worrying. Brandy and vibrochairs can
wait. This is the most important thing I'll ever do in my life!
He
disconnected the sonic screen; the harpsichord music died away in the middle of
a twanging cadence. Yeats returned to the bookshelf. He took a final sip of brandy
and replaced the flask in the sideboard.
Within
half an hour he had compiled a list of those people
who needed to be notified about his departure, and he programmed his
robosecretary to make such notification—after he
had left. No point in getting into long debates with people over who was going
to cover his classes, who was going to read the galleys on his new book. Better to confront people with the fait accompli of his departure and let them make decisions
without him.
Packing
was a problem; he winnowed out several fat books, packed two slim ones, some
clothing, some memodiscs. He found himself unable to sleep, even after taking a
relaxotab, and he rose near dawn to pace his flat in tense anticipation. At 1100 hours he decided to transmat across to New York, but his guidebook told
him it would still be early in the morning on the other side of the Atlantic.
He waited an hour, dialed ahead for courtesy permission to cross, and set his
transmat for the Archonate Center.
He stepped through, wondering as always at
the manner
21
of the transmat's operation. His thought was
cut in half as the field seized hold of him; when he emerged at the other end,
he was still in mid-thought.
Dour-faced Archonate men waited for him.
"Come this way, Dr.
Bernard."
He
followed, feeling strangely conspicuous, like a sacrificial'victim being led
to the altar. They led him into an adjoining room whose monumentality
indicated plainly that it was the private chamber of the Technarch McKenzie,
the embodiment of human strength and ambition.
The
Technarch himself was not present in his chambers at the moment. But three
other men were, and they came to attention as Bernard entered, looking him
over with the tense anticipation of men who were still uncertain of their own
positions.
Bernard studied them.
To his left, in the far corner of the room, stood a tall, dark-faced man
whose lips were.drawn down in an austere, almost gloomy scowl. His body was long and angular, seemingly
strung together out of rods and pipes. He wore the somber clothes that
indicated his affiliation with the Neopuritan movement. Bernard bristled
instinctively; he had grown to regard the Neopuritans with open distaste, as
men whose values were so far from his that no reconciliation was possible.
Closer
to Bernard stood a second man, shorter, but still a little over six feet in height. He was a cheerfully affable-looking man
in his early fifties, with pink close-shaven skin that radiated hearty good
health and a sense of enjoyment of life. The third man in the room was short
and stocky, with quick, darting black eyes and heavy frown-lines in his forehead.
He seemed a packet of energy, contained but ready to burst forth at any
unpredictable moment.
Bernard
looked around, hiding his discomfort. "Hello," he said, before anyone
else could speak. "My name's Martin Bernard, and
I'm a sociologist, and one of the somewhat puzzled draftees for this thing. Are
you three part of this outfit too, or just here to
confer?"
The
ruddy-faced, affable-looking man smiled warmly and put out his hand. Bernard
took it. A soft hand, uncalloused,
22
but
strong nevertheless. "Roy Stone," the man announced. "I'm
basically a politician, I guess. Officially I'm the understudy for the Archon
of Colonial Affairs." "Pleased," Bernard muttered ritually.
"And
I'm Norman Dominici," the stocky one said, crossing the room in tense
steps that added to the impression of penned-up nervous energy he gave.
"I'm a biophysicist— when I'm not out on expeditions to greenfaced aliens,
that is. Welcome to our little band, Bernard."
Only
the Neopuritan had not offered an introduction, He remained where he was, at
the wall but not leaning against it. Bernard felt irritated at the man's lack
of courtesy, but the sociologist's innate desire for friendship got the better
of him, and he turned uncertainly toward the Neopuritan, resolved to make the
first overture.
"Hello?" Bernard
said doubtfully.
"Watch
out," Norman Dominici warned sotto voce. "He's
just isn't the friendly type."
The
big man turned slowly to face Bernard. He was, the sociologist thought, a
veritable hulking giant of a man—six feet seven in height, at the very least.
The Neopuritan bore the aloof, withdrawn look that men sometimes develop when
they grow to enormous heights at precocious ages. A ten-year-old who stands six
feet tall is never really going to get very chummy with the playmates over whom
he towers, and the gulf quite unsurprisingly tended to widen in later years.
"The
name is Thomas Havig," the lanky Neopuritan said in a high-pitched, reedy
voice that was surprisingly thin for one so tall. "I don't believe we've
met before, Dr. Bernard— but we've shared the pages of several learned
periodicals in the recent past."
Bernard's
eyes went wide with sudden amazement and consternation. Of all people ... I "You're Thomas Havig of Columbia?" he asked.
"Thomas
Havig of Columbia, yes," the big man replied. "The
Thomas Havig who wrote Conjectures on the Etruscan
Morphemes, Dr. Bernard." The merest trace of a smile appeared
on Havig's thin lips. "It was an article which you didn't seem to
appreciate, I fear."
Bernard looked at the other two men, then
back at Havig.
23
"Why—why,
I simply found myself totally unable to swallow any one of your premises, Havig.
Starting from the initial statement and going right down the line through
everything you said. You flatly contradicted everything we know about the
Etruscan personality and culture, you wantonly
attempted to distort the known body of knowledge to fit your own preconceived
social philosophy, you—you simply didn't handle the job in a way I thought
proper."
"And
therefore," Havig asked quietly, "you took it upon yourself to
attempt to destroy my reputation and standing in the academic community."
"I
merely wrote a dissenting opinion," shot back Bernard hody. "I
couldn't let your statements stand unanswered. And the Journal saw fit to print it. It. .
."
"It
was a malicious, slanderous article," Havig said, without raising his
voice to the level Bernard had adopted. "Under the guise of scholarship
you covered me with unwarranted ridicule and cast abuse on my private beliefs .
. ."
"Which
were relevant to the argument you were presenting!"
"Nonetheless,
your entire attitude, Dr. Bernard, was an unscholarly one. Your emotional
attack on me clouded the issue and made it impossible for disinterested
observers to see what the point of dissent between us really was. Your article
was a display of wit—a quite scintillating display, I am told—but hardly a scholastic
refutation."
Stone
and Dominici had stood by somewhat puzzledly through the rapid-fire interchange
of accusations. Now, evidently, Stone had decided that the bickering had gone
far enough. He chuckled—the mollifying chuckle of the professional diplomat—and
said wryly, "Evidently you gentlemen are old friends, even though you've
never met. Or should I say more accurately old enemies?"
Bernard glowered at the Neopuritan. Damned pious fraud, he thought. "We've had our disagreements
scholastically," Bernard admitted.
"You
aren't going to carry those disagreements along for ten-thousand light-years,
are you?" Dominici asked. "It's going to make things damned
uncomfortable in that ship if you
24
two
will be battling over Etruscan morphemes all the while, you know."
Bernard
let a smile cross his face. He was not particularly disposed to be friendly
toward Havig, but there was nothing to be gained by continuing the quarrel. The
causes, he thought, lay too deep to be resolved easily. He was convinced that
Havig hated him bitterly, and could not be soothed; still, the harmony of the
expedition was important. Bernard said, "I suppose we can forget the
Etruscans for this trip. Eh, Havig? Our quarrel was pretty small beer, after
all."
He
extended his hand. After a moment the towering Neo-puritan grudgingly took it.
The shake was brief; hands dropped quickly back to sides. Bernard moistened his
lips. He and Havig had battled viciously over what was, indeed, a minor
technical point. It was one of those quarrels that specialists often engage in
when their separate specialties meet at a common point of junction. But it
hardly was a good omen if he and Havig were part of the same team; the fundamental
gap in their beliefs would be too great to allow of any real cooperation,
Bernard thought.
"Well,"
said Roy Stone nervously, "we'll be leaving almost any minute now."
"The
Technarch said we'd have at least until tonight," Bernard said.
"Yes.
But we're all assembled, you see. And the ship and crew are ready as well. So
there's no point in delaying any farther."
"The Technarch wastes
no time," Havig muttered darkly.
"There
isn't much time to be wasted," Stone replied. "The quicker we get out
there and deal with those aliens, the more certain we can be of preventing war
between the two cultures."
"War's
inevitable, Stone," said Dominici doggedly. "You don't have to be a
sociologist to see that. Two cultures are colliding. We're just wasting time
and breath by going out there to head off the
inevitable."
"If
that's the way you feel," Bernard said, "why did you agree to go
along?"
"Because the Technarch asked me to
go," Dominici said
25
simply.
"I needed no better reason. But I'm not confident of success."
The
door irised open suddenly. Technarch McKenzie entered,
a bulky, powerful figure in his formal robes. Tech-narchs were chosen for their
size and bearing as well as for their qualities of mind.
"Have
you four managed to introduce yourselves to each
Other?" McKenzie asked.
"Yes,
Excellency," Stone said.
McKenzie
smiled. "You'll be leaving in four hours
from Central Australia. Well use the transmat in
the next room. Commander Laurance and his crew are already out there, giving
the ship its final checkdown." The Technarch's eyes flicked meaningfully
from Bernard to Havig, and back. "I've picked you four for your abilities,
understand. I know some of you have
had differences professionally. Forget them. Is that understood?"
Bernard nodded. Havig
grunted assent.
"Good,"
the Technarch snapped. "I've appointed Dr. Bernard as nominal leader of
the expedition. All that means is that final decisions will rest with him in
case of absolute dead-lock. If any of you object, speak up right now."
The Technarch looked at
Havig. But no one objected.
McKenzie went on, "I don't need to tell
you to cooperate with Commander Laurance and his crew
in every way possible. They're fine men, but they've
just had one grueling voyage, and now they're going right out again
on another one.
Don't grate on their
nerves. It can cost you all
your lives if one of them pushes the wrong
button."
The
Technarch paused as if expecting final questions. None came. Turning, he led the way to the adjoining
trans-mat cubicle. Stone, Havig, and Dominici followed, with Bernard bringing up the rear.
We're
an odd lot to be going starward, Bernard thought. But
the Technarch must know what he's doing. At least, I hope he does.
FOUR
One
thing mankind had forgotten
how to do, in the peaceful years of expansion under the Archonate: it had
forgotten how to wait.
The transmat provided
instantaneous transport and communication; from any point within the
400-light-year radius of Terra's sphere of dominion, any other point could be
reached instantaneously. Such convenience does not breed a culture of patient
men. Of all Terra's sons, only a special few knew how to wait. They were the
spacemen who piloted the lonely plasma-drive ships outward into the night,
bearing with them the transmat generators that would make their destinations
instantaneously accessible to their fellow men.
Someone
had to make the trip by
slow freight first. Spacemen knew how to wait out the empty hours, the endless
circlings of the clock-hands. Not so others; they fidgeted the hours past.
The XV-ftl had left Earth at a three-g acceleration hurling a fiery jet of stripped
nuclei behind it until it had built up to a velocity of three-fourths that of
light. The plasma-drive was shut down, and the ship coasted onward at a speed
fast enough to drive it nearly five times around the Earth in a twinkling of an
eye. And its four passengers fretted in an agony of impatience.
Bernard
stared without comprehending at the pages of his book. Havig paced. Dominici
ground his teeth together and narrowed his forehead till his frowning brows
met. Stone haunted the vision port, peering at the frosty brilliance of the
stars as if searching in them for the answer to some wordless question.
The four men were quartered together, in the
rear compartment of the slender ship. Fore, Laurance and his four crewmen were
stationed. When acceleration had ended, Bernard went forward to watch them at
work. It was like observing the priests of some arcane rite. Laurance stood in
the center of the control panel like a tree in a storm, while about him the
others carried on in a furious rage of energy. Naka-mura, eyes hooded by the
viewpiece of an astrogating device,
27
chanted
numbers to Clive; Clive integrated them and passed them to Hernandez, who fed
them to a computer. Peters-zoon correlated; Laurance coordinated. Each man had
his job, each did it well. Bernard turned away, impressed by their fierce
efficiency, feeling a layman's awe.
And
no doubt they think it's just as mysterious to write a sonnet or formulate theorems in sociometrics, he thought. Complexity is all a matter of viewpoint.
Chalk up another score for relativistic philosophy.
The
hours dragged mercilessly. Some time later that day, when the four passengers
were coming to their breaking-point, the door to their compartment opened and
the crewman named Clive entered.
He was a small man, built on a slight scale,
with a mocking, youthful face and unruly, strangely graying hair. He smiled
and said, "We're passing across the orbit of Pluto. Commander Laurance
says for me to tell you that we'll be making the mass-time conversion any
minute now."
"Will
there be warning?" Dominici asked. "Or will it—just happen?"
"You'll
know about it. We'll sound a gong, for one thing. But you can't miss it."
"Thank
God we're out of the solar system," Bernard said fervently. "I
thought the first leg of the trip would last forever."
Clive
chuckled. "You realize you've covered four billion miles in less than a
day?"
"It seems like so much
longer."
"The
medieval spacemen used to be glad if they could make it to Mars in a
year," Clive said. "You think this is bad? You ought to see what it's
like to make a plasma-drive hop between stars. Like five years in one little
ship so you can plant a transmat pickup on Betelgeuse XXDi. That's when you leam how to be patient."
"How long wOl we be in warp-drive?" Stone asked.
"Seventeen
hours. Then it'll take a few hours more to decelerate. Call it a day between
now and landing." The little spaceman showed yellowed teeth. "Imagine
that! A day and a half to cover ten thousand light-years,
and you guys are complaining!" He doubled up with laughter, slapping his
28
thigh.
Bernard and the other three watched the spaceman's amusement without comment.
Then
Clive was serious again. "Remember—when you hear the gong, we're
converting."
"Should we strap down?"
Clive shook his head. "There's no change
in velocity; you won't feel any jolt." He grinned. "Maybe you won't
feel anything at all. We're still kinda new at this faster-than-light stuff,
y'know."
There
was no reply. Clive shrugged and walked out, letting the bulkhead swing shut
behind him.
Bernard
laughed. "He's right, of course. We're idiots for being so impatient. It's
just that we're accustomed to getting places the instant we want to get there.
To them, this trip must seem ridiculously fast."
"I
don't care how fast it seems to them," Dominici said tightly.
"Sitting around in a little cabin for hour after hour is hell for me. And for all the rest of us."
"Perhaps you can now see the advantages
of learning to resign yourself to the existence of discomfort," advised
Havig gravely. "Impatience is unwise. It leads to anger, anger to
rashness, rashness to sin. But. . ."
Dominici whirled to face the Neopuritan, a
muscle cording in his cheek. The biophysicist snapped heatedly, "Don't
hand me any of your filthy piousness, Havig! I'm tensed up and I'm damned if I
like being cooped up, and words aren't going to make me feel any better! And
anyway . . ."
"Not
words, no," Havig said equably. "But the truths that lie behind the
words are important. The truth of seeing yourself in relation to Eternity—of
knowing that a momentary delay is of no importance—of seeing your place in the
vast mechanism of the universe—this helps one overcome the itch of
impatience."
"Will
you keep that to yourself?" Dominici shouted. "Hold it, hold it, both of you!" Stone broke in. The chubby
diplomat seemed to be cast in a permanent role as peacemaker in the
expedition. "Calm down, Dominici. Steady. You aren't making it any easier
for us by blowing your stack. Just ease off."
"He had provocation," Bernard said,
glaring at Havig. "Mr.
29
Gloom over there in the corner was handing
out free advice. That's enough to touch anyone off. I'm surprised you didn't
bring a bunch of tracts along to distribute, Havig."
An
uncharacteristic flicker of amusement appeared on the Neopuritan's face. "My apologies. I was trying to relieve the general
tension you others feel, not to increase it. Perhaps I erred in speaking up. It
seemed my duty, that's all." *
"We aren't
convertible," Bernard said bluntly.
"We
teach, but we do not proselytize," Havig replied levelly. "I was only
trying to help."
"It wasn't
needed."
Stone
sighed. "Some fine bunch of treatymakers we are! You'll all be leaping for
each other's throats before long if this goes . . ."
The
gong sounded suddenly, resonating through the cabin with an impact that
everyone felt. It was a deep, full-throated bonging chime, repeated three
times, dying away slowly after the last with a shimmer of harmonics.
The
quarrel ended as though a curtain had been brought down to separate the
quarrellers.
"We're
making the conversion," Dominici muttered hoarsely. He swung around to
face the wall, and Bernard realized in some surprise, by observing the motions
Dominici's right elbow was describing, that the seemingly skeptical
biophysicist was making the sign of the cross.
Bernard
felt uncomfortable. Although not a religious man himself, he wished he could
commend himself in some way to a watchful deity, and take comfort therein. As
it was, he could do no more than trust to good fortune. He felt monumentally
alone, with the dark night of the universe only inches from him beyond the
walls of the ship. And soon not even the universe would be there.
Distressed,
Bernard looked at his fellow voyagers. Havig was moving his lips in silent
prayer, eyes open but lost in contemplation of the Eternity that now was so
near. Dominici's hoarse whisper rasped across the room, intoning Latin words
Bernard knew only from his studies. Stone, evidently like Bernard a man without
religious affiliation, had lost some of his cheery ruddiness of cheek, and sat
staring leadenly at the wall opposite him, trying to look unconcerned.
30
They waited.
If
the hours since their blastoff from Earth had seemed long, the minutes
immediately following the gong were eternities. No one spoke. Bernard sat back,
tasting the coppery taste of fear in his mouth, and wondering what he was
afraid of that turned his tongue so dry.
He
had no clear idea of what effect to anticipate as they made the conversion.
Moments passed, and then he felt a dull vibration, heard a thrumming sound: the
mighty Daviot-Leeson generators building up potential, most likely. Bernard
knew about as much of the theory as any intelligent layman might. In a moment
or two, he realized, a fist of energy would lash out in cosmic violence, sunder
the continuum, and create a doorway through which the XV-ftl might glide.
Into where?
Into
what kind of universe?
Bernard's
mind could form no picture of it. All he knew was that they would enter some
adjoining universe where distances were irrational figures, where objects might
simultaneously occupy the same space. A universe that had been mapped—how accurately,
he wondered?—in five years of experimental work, and now was being navigated by
bold men who plunged onward with but the foggiest concept of where they were or where they might be heading.
The thrumming grew louder.
"When does it
happen?" Stone asked.
Bernard
shrugged. In the silence, he heard himself saying, "I guess it must take a
couple of minutes for the generators to build up the charge. And then we go
kicking through . .
The
change came. -
The
first hint was the flickering of the lights, only momentarily, as the great
power surge drained the dynamos. The only other immediate effect was a
psychological one: Bernard felt cut loose, severed from all he knew and
trusted, cast into a darkness so mighty it was beyond comprehension by mortal
man.
The
feeling passed. Bernard took a deep breath. Nothing was different, after all.
The sensation of loneliness, of separation, that had been nothing but the
trick of an overeager imagination.
"Look at the vision port," Stone breathed.
"The stars—they aren't there!"
Bernard
spun around. It was true. A moment before, the port, a three-by-four television screen that gave direct pickup from the skin of the
ship, had been dazzling with the glory of the stars. Unending cascades of brightness
had glinted against the airless black. Some of the planets had been visible
against the backdrop of the Milky Way: red Mars, gem-like Venus.
Now all that was gone. Stars, planets, cascades of bright glory. The
screen showed a featureless gray. It was as though the universe had been
blotted out.
Once
again the bulkhead light flashed. Stone pushed the switch to admit, this time,
John Laurance himself.
"We've
made the conversion successfully, gentlemen. What you see on the screen is a
completely empty universe in which we're the only bit of matter."
Stone said, "In that
case, what do you steer by?"
Laurance
shrugged. "Rule of thumb. The unmanned ships were
sent into no-space; they travelled along certain vectors that we've charted,
and they came out someplace else. For lack of landmarks we just follow our
noses."
"It
doesn't sound like"a very efficient way of getting places," Dominici
said.
"It
isn't," Laurance admitted. "But we don't happen to have any other
choice."
Bernard
studied the spaceman closely. Fatigue was evident in every line of Laurance's
craggy face. The oddly soft eyes were red with shattered capillaries. They said
that Laurance needed no more than three hours of sleep out of each twenty-four;
but it would seem, just to look at him, that he had not even been getting his
normal minimum.
"You look tired, Commander," the
sociologist said.
Again
Laurance shrugged. "I am, Dr. Bernard. All of my men are tired. Again—we
don't have any other choice."
"Is
it safe to operate a complicated ship like this if you're overtired?"
"The Technarch seemed to think so,"
replied Laurance with what seemed a lingering trace of bitterness. "The
Tech-
32
narch was
in an almighty hurry to get this ship back out into space again."
"We
have faith in the Technarch," said Dominici. "Mc-Kenzie's got as good
a head on his shoulders as old Beng-strom ever had. He must have some reason
for wanting the hurry-up."
"Technarch
McKenzie is but a mortal man," Havig remarked. "He's subject to
error."
Dominici
lifted an eyebrow. "There are people who'd fall down in catatonic shock if
you ever said anything like that about an Archon in their hearing, Havig."
"I
have no exaggerated awe for these men. They were chosen from among
mankind," the Neopuritan went on.
"Yes,"
Bernard said. "Chosen in their teens and trained for decades in the art of
ruling, before they eventually take over their Archonates. It's obviously a
good system, the first really workable system of government Earth as a whole
has ever had. But Commander Laurance didn't come in here to discuss the
Technarch's qualifications with us, I imagine."
"No,
I didn't," Laurance said with a grave smile. "I came in to tell you
that all was well with the ship, that we'll be eating in half an hour, and that
we expect to be in the neighborhood of Star NGCR 185143 in, oh, about
seventeen hours plus or minus a few seconds." Laurance paused just a moment,
long enough to consolidate his dominance in the little group. Then he said,
"Ah—Mister Clive tells me you're all a bit edgy back there. That you've
even been doing some bickering."
Bernard
reddened. He was positive that there was the beginning of contempt in
Laurance's eyes, contempt of the hardbitten spaceman for the soft academics in
the cabin.
Out
of the embarrassed silence came, as usual, Stone's
mollifying voice. "We've had our little disagreements, yes, Commander.
Minor differences of opinion ..."
"I
understand, gentlemen," Laurance said blandly—but behind the blandness lay
solid steel. "May I remind you that you've been entrusted with a very
great responsibility. I hope you'll have settled
your—ah—'minor differences' before we reach your destination."
"Matter of fact, we just about have them
under control now," Stone said.
"Good." Laurance moved toward the
door. "You'll find a packet of relaxotabs in the medical supply cabinet
over there to my left, just in case your 'edginess' should continue and become
a serious problem. I'll expect you in the fore galley in half an hour."
There was a moment of awkward silence after
Laurance had gone. Then Dominici said, "That fellow's almost as regal as
the Technarch, you know? They're of the same breed. 'May I remind you that you've been entrusted
with a very great responsibility,' " he mimicked. "The Commander's got the same
lordly way of telling you off and making you feel
three feet high that McKenzie has."
"Maybe
Laurance is a trainee who didn't quite make the grade for the Archonate,"
Stone suggested quietly. As a trainee himself—for the
Archonate of Colonial Affairs—he. might be
expected to know something of the inside story of maneuvering for high office.
But
Bernard said, "It just isn't likely, really. McKenzie wouldn't trust a
runner-up with anything as big as this; too much rivalry involved. But it's
always possible that Laurance is one of the next generation
of trainees. For all we know, he's been picked to succeed McKenzie some
day."
"Would
McKenzie risk losing his hand-picked successor in a dangerous flight like this?" Dominici asked.
"A
Technarch must be forged in the crucible of danger," Havig observed.
"If Laurance could not survive a voyage in space, how would he survive the
pressures of office? This may be a testing flight."
*Tou may have something
there," Stone admitted.
There
were no further speculations.^ The tension and uncertainty
of the job that lay ahead of them dulled conversation, made them all jumpy and
restless.
When
a half hour had elapsed, the four went up front for the meal. The menu was an
array of synthetics, of course-but synthetics lovingly prepared by Nakamura and
Hernandez, who approached the job of meal-making the way other men might
approach the writing of poetry. After the meal, the four passengers made their
way rearward to their cabin,
34
More
than sixteen hours remained to the no-space leg of their journey. Time was
crawling; it might just as well have been sixteen years of traveling ahead.
Bernard
settled into his acceleration cradle and tried to read; but it was no use.
Obtrusive thoughts of danger got between his mind and his book. The words
danced on the page, and the delicate imagery of Suyamo's classic verse blurred
into hopeless confusion. In complete disgust, Bernard slammed the book shut.
He
closed his eyes. After a while, the babel of thought slackened, and he fell
into a light, uneasy sleep that gradually deepened.
Some
time later, he groped his way back to wakefulness. A glance at the cabin clock
told him that only four hours yet remained till transition, so he had been
asleep nearly twelve. It surprised him. He had not thought he was as fatigued
as that, to let twelve hours slip away almost instantaneously in sleep.
He
looked around the cabin. Dominici was fast asleep, his eyes screwed shut, his
mouth contorted in a peculiar grimace. He was twisting and turning as he slept;
obviously he was having a bad dream. Bernard wondered if he had looked as
restless and troubled in his sleep.
Next
to him, Stone sat peering endlessly out the vision port at nothing whatever.
Realizing that Bernard was awake, Stone turned and flashed a quick, insincere
grin, then turned his attention back to the port.
Only
Havig seemed at peace with himself and with the mysterious environment outside.
The big man leaned back, his long legs stretched forward in a rare gesture of
relaxation. A book lay open in Havig's lap—a prayerbook, probably, Bernard
thought. The Neopuritan was turning the pages slowly, nodding, occasionally smiling to himself. He took no notice of
anything about him. The very tranquility of the man irritated Bernard
obscurely.
Bernard
forced himself to stop thinking about the frictions that existed in the cabin,
and to ponder the enigmatic nature of the aliens waiting ahead.
He
had seen their photos, in tridim and color, and so he had at least a tentative idea of what to expect physically.
35
But
yet he looked forward to the coming meeting with complete uncertainty. Would
contact be possible, communication of even the simplest sort? And if they could
speak to each other, would an agreement be forthcoming?.
Or was the civilization of men doomed to be racked by an interstellar war that
would send the centuries-old peace imposed by the Archonate crumbling?
The
rise of the oligarchy, Bernard thought, had ended the confusion and doubt of
the Nightmare Years. But what if the aliens refused to meet and enter into
peaceful treaties? What would the strength of the Archonate be worth then?
He
had no answers. He forced himself to concentrate on his reading. The hours
marched past, until the gong sounded once again, as if foretelling an
apocalypse.
The sound of the gong died away. Transition
was made.
The
vision screen exploded into brilliant life. New constellations;
eye-numbing new clusters of stars, perhaps including among them a dot of light
that was Earth's sun.
And,
hanging before them like a blazing ball, was a golden-yellow sun darkened by
the shadow of planets in transit across its disk.
FIVE
The
ship swung
"downward," cutting across the ecliptic plane to seek out the orbit
of the fourth of the golden star's eleven worlds. Assuming an observation orbit
five hundred fifty miles above the planet, the XV-ftl zipped round four times before spying the alien settlement. It lay in
the shadowed nightside of the planet. The encroaching path of brightness,
peeling the night away from the turning planet, told that the alien settlement
was not many hours from dawn.
In
the rear cabin, Martin Bernard and his fellow negotiators lay strapped in,
shielded against the atmospheric buffeting of landing, waiting the minutes out
as the XV-ftl dropped in
36
ever-narrowing spirals toward the darkness below. Bernard felt strangely helpless as
the ship coiled through its landing orbit. Here I am, he thought, trussed into a mattress like a child in the
womb waiting to be born. And no more capable of landing this ship than a child
in the womb is of delivering himself and cutting the umbilicus.
Queasiness
of the stomach assailed him. His life, all their lives, lay in the hands of
five bloodshot, tired men. A miscalculation in somebody's computations and
they might smash into the unnamed planet below at fifty thousand miles a
second. Or they might miss the planet altogether, have to come back and make
another nervewracking pass at it.
Bernard
swiveled his head backward until his eyes met Stone's. The pudgy diplomat's
face was pale and glossy with sweat. But he managed to grin.
"I
don't go much for this spaceship travel," Bernard said. "How
about you?"
"Give
me transmat every time," Stone murmured. "But we can't very well be
choosy this trip, eh?"
"Guess
not," Bernard admitted. "No choice of accomodations for us."
He
fell silent again, reminded once again of how little scope for free action a
human being really had. The dully deterministic fact had been hammered home to
him in his undergraduate days, when he had first encountered the damnably
unanswerable set of sociometric equations that covered most of man's traits and
behavior patterns. There's
hardly any choice. We're prisoners of—well, call it necessity for lack of a
neater term. The only choices we get are low-level ones; and maybe we aren't
even really choosing then.
The
ship jounced down through the atmosphere. It was a bumpy drop; Bernard was
grateful for the cradle he nestled in. He had never realized that spaceship
travel was as crude and as clumsy as this. A transmat trip was clean, sharp,
like the blade of a microtome: you stepped in, you stepped out, and you were
there. None of this tiresome business of acceleration and
deceleration, matching velocities, actions-and-equal-but-opposite reactions.
He smiled, thinking how little he actually
knew about the physics of space travel. He, who had spent his honeymoon
37
on a
green pLeasure-world in the Sirius system, who had vacationed on planets
orbiting Beta Centauri and Bellatrix and Eta Ursae Majoris, was hazier on the
Newtonian facts of life than most schoolboys building their first model
rockets. Blame it on the transmat, he thought. No one cared how a rocketship
worked when he could step through cool green flame and exit four hundred
light-years from home.
Bernard
eyed the planet growing in the viewscreen. They were too close to regard it as
a sphere, now; it had flattened tremendously, and nearly a third of its area
was outside the screen's subtended angle of vision.
As
the XV-ftl whirled past dayside, Bernard caught glimpses
of great continents lying in a blue-green sea like slabs of meat against a
table. All was motionless, even the fleecy wisps of cloud far below, the dark
blotch of a raging storm. Then they were plunged into night, and only
indistinct shapes could be seen.
Emerging
^nto dayside again, now the bright threads of the bigger rivers could be picked
out. One vast waterway seemed to travel diagonally across the biggest
continent, cutting a channel from northeast to southwest and
proliferating into hundreds of smaller streams. Mountain ranges rose like
buckled humps in the far west and north. Most of the continent was a verdant
green, shading into a darker color toward the north and in the
highlands.
Closing
his eyes, Bernard choked back his dizziness and waited for the moment of
landing.
It
came some time later; he realized he had dozed, an after-effect of the deceleration pills Nakamura had handed out at the
last meal. But he woke suddenly, as if having a premonition of arrival, and, moments afterward, he sensed a gentle thump. That was all.
It had been a perfect
landing.
The
voice of Laurance came over the intercabin speaker: "We've made our
landing without trouble. Our landing-point is some ten or twelve miles east of
the alien settlement. The sun is due to rise here in about an hour. Well be
leaving the. ship as soon as routine area
decontamination is carried out."
The
routine decontamination took only a few minutes. Then, once all radiation
products incident to the landing had
38
been
sluiced away, the hatch slid open and the air of another world came filtering
into the ship.
He
stood at the lip of the hatch now, testing the air. It was much like Earth's;
but there was a fraction more of oxygen in it, not enough of an overplus to
jeopardize health but just enough to give the air a rich, heady quality. It was
almost like breathing fine white wine. He felt, after a few inhalations, a confidence
that had deserted him in the dark hours just before landing.
"Let's
go, Dr. Bernard," Peterszoon called to him from below. "We can't wait
all day."
"Sorry,"
Bernard said. He reddened and hastily clambered down the catwalk to the ground.
The five crewmen were there already. Stone, Dominici, and Havig followed.
A fresh morning breeze, slightly chill, swept
down across the meadow in which they had landed. The sky was still gray, and a
few last stars of morning still glimmered faintly. But pink streaks of dawning
were beginning to splash across the sky. The temperature, Bernard estimated,
was in the forties or fifties: promise of a warm morning. The air had the
transparent freshness one found only on a virgin world where the belch of a
furnace was unknown.
It might have been Earth on some
ninth-century morning, thought Bernard; but there were differences, subtle but
none the less positive ones. The grass under their feet, only to take,one; its blue-green blades sprouted triple from
the stalk, twisting round each other in a complex little pattern before
springing upward. No grass on Earth had ever grown in such a way.
The
trees—looming evergreens two hundred feet high, their boles a dozen feet thick
at the base—were different, too. Cones three feet long dangled from the
nearest; its bark was pale yellow, ruffled by horizontal striations; its leaves
were broad glossy green knives, a foot long, two inches wide. Crickets
chittered underfoot, but when Bernard caught sight of one he saw it was a grotesque little creature
three or four inches long, green with beady golden eyes and a savage little
beak. Great oval toadstools with table-like tops a foot or more in diameter
sprouted everywhere in the meadow, bright purple against the blue-green.
Dominici knelt to touch one
39
and it
crumbled like a dream when his finger grazed the fungus' rim.
For
the long moment, no one spoke. Bernard felt a sort of tingle of awe, and knew
the others were sharing his emotion; the wonder of setting foot on a planet
where mankind and civilization had not yet begun to work changes. This was the
planet as it had come from the maker's hand, and even a nonbeliever like Bernard could respond to that.
The
men were silent, hearing the cool wind whistle sighingly through the towering
trees, hearing the unseen harmonious symphony of crickets and the awakening,
dawn-hungry birds, and perhaps the deeper cry of some unknown forest beast
thrashing through the black thicket to the south.
And then the wonder faded.
This world was not
unmarred, Bernard thought.
Perhaps
mankind had not yet set down a colony here— but others had.
It was a grim thing to call to mind in the
midst of this
primeval beauty, the ugly reminder of their purpose in com-
ing here. Bernard's expression darkened. How could a world
this lovely be a menace to Earth? The world itself was not
the menace, he thought. It merely symbolized the threat of
two colliding cultures. ^
Laurance
cut into his mood, saying quietly, "We'll proceed to the alien village on
foot. There are two landsleds aboard the ship, but I'm not going to use
them."
"Is the hike
necessary?" Bernard said.
"I
feel it is," Laurance replied, hiding none too well his annoyance of
Bernard's love of comfort. "I feel it might look too much like an armed
invasion to the aliens if we came rolling up inside the landsleds. We might
never get a chance to tell them we were friendly."
"In that case, what about weapons?" Dominici said. "Do you have enough to
spare for the four of us? If we have to defend ourselves, we ..."
"Weapons?" Laurance repeated, startled. "Do you really expect to carry weapons?"
"Well
. . ." the biophysicist stammered, thrown off balance by Laurance's tone.
"Of course I thought we'd be armed, just
40
as a
precautionary measure. Alien beings—you yourself said they might be surprised
when we approach them . . ."
Laurance
grimly tapped the magnum pistol at his side. "I'm carrying the only weapon
we'll need."
"But. . ."
"If
the aliens react to us with hostility," said Laurance in a dry voice, "you may quite possibly all become martyrs to the cause
of Terran diplomacy. I hope each of you is thoroughly reconciled to that fact
right here and now. I'd ten times as much rather see us ail shot to ashes by
alien blasters than to have some jumpy negotiator fly off the handle and pump
bullets into them just because one of his private neuroses has been activated.
It isn't wise to make a ten-mile overland journey through unknown territory
without some
sort of weapon, which is
why I'm carrying this. But I'm damned if I'm going to let all of us walk into
that alien camp looking like an invasion party." He glanced around, his
eyes coming to rest in turn on Dominici, Havig, Stone, and Bernard. "Is
that perfectly clear?" Laurance asked.
No
one replied. Uncomfortably, Bernard scratched his cheek and tried to look as
though he were reconciled to the idea of martyrdom. He wasn't.
"No
objections," Laurance said, more relaxedly. "Good.
"We're agreed, then. I carry
the gun; I'm alone answerable for the consequences of my carrying it. Believe me, I'm not worried about my survival so much as I am about
someone else's rash actions. Are there any other questions?"
Hearing none, Laurance shrugged. "Very well. We'll set out at once."
He turned, checking his position against a
tiny compass that was embedded, along with several other indicators, in the
sleeve of his leather jacket, and nodded toward the west Without
further preamble or prologue, he began to walk.
Nakamura and Peterszoon fell in wordlessly
behind him, Clive and Hernandez back of them. The five men trudged off at a
good clip, none of them looking around to see if the negotiators were
following.
Shrugging, Bernard scurried after the five
rapidly retreating spacemen, Dominici jogging alongside him. Stone fol-
41
lowed,
with Havig, reserved and self-contained as ever, bringing up the rear.
"They
don't treat us as if we're very important," Bernard complained to
Dominici. "They seem to forget that we're the reason they're here."
"They
don't forget it," Dominici growled. "They just feel contempt for lazy
Earthlubbers like us. They resent our existence. 'Transmat people,' they call
us, with a sort of arrogant sneer in their voices. As though there's something
really morally wrong
about taking the quickest
possible route between two points."
"Only
insofar as it weakens the body's capacity for endurance," Havig said
quietly from the rear. "Anything which makes us less fit to bear the
burden of earthly existence, is morally wrong."
"Taking
the transmat does
breed some bad
habits," Bernard said, surprised to find himself on the same side as
Havig for a change. "We lose a sense of appreciation of the universe.
Since the transmat was invented we've completely forgotten what the fact of
distance really means. We don't think of time as a
function of distance any more; they do. And to the extent that we can't control
our impatience, we're weaklings in a spaceman's eyes."
"And
all of us weaklings in God's eyes," Havig said. "But some of us more
prepared to go to Him than others."
"Shut
up," Dominici said without rancor. "We might all be going to Him in a
very short time. Don't remind me."
"Are you afraid of
dying?" Havig asked.
"Just
annoyed by the thought of not getting done everything I'd like to,"
Dominici said. "Let's get off the topic."
"And
let's stay off it," Bernard said vehemently, "That one-track
philosopher back there is going to peddle piety once too often,
and . . ."
"Watch it," Stone
murmured warningly.
They fell silent. The path was on a slight
upgrade, and despite the tiny extra percentage of oxygen in the air Bernard
soon found himself puffing and panting, He had made a point of keeping himself
in trim with a weekly visit to an exercise house in Djakarta, but now he was
speedily discovering the measurable psychological difference between doing
42
pushups in
a gym under relaxed conditions and climbing a steady upgrade on an alien world.
Anxiety toxins were flooding his body now, willy-nilly. The
poison of fear added to the fatigue of his muscles, slowing him
down. He dropped back a little, letting Dominici move ahead.
Once, he stumbled, and Havig caught his elbow to steady
him; when he looked around Bernard saw the Neopuritan
grin briefly and heard him say, "All of us stumble on our
paths, friend." -n
Bernard was too weary to retort. Havig seemed
to have an unearthly knack for turning even the most minor incident into an
occasion for homily. Or, Bernard wondered wearily, what if Havig were only
spoofing, parodying himself much of the time in a ponderous kind of humor? No,
he thought, Havig didn't have a scrap of humor anywhere in his huge frame. When
he said something he meant
it.
Bernard
pushed ahead. Laurance and his men, moving along up front, never seemed to
flag. They strode on like men in seven-league boots, clearing a way through the
sometimes impassable brush that blockid the path; detouring skillfully to
circle a fallen bee whose man-high trunk, already overgrown with yellow
fungus, prevented advance; pausing to estimate the depth of a dark, swiftly
flowing stream before plunging across through water that sometimes rose as high
as the tops of their hip-boots.
He
was beginning to lose his appreciation of this planet's wild beauty. Even
beauty can pall, especially under circumstances of discomfort. The blazing
glory of purple flowers a foot across no longer registered on Bernard. The
sleek grace of the white, cat-like creatures that bolted across their paths
like streaks of flame no longer pleased him. The raucous, almost obscene cries
of the birds in the towering trees no longer seemed amusing, but merely
insulting.
Bernard
had never realized in any concrete way that the abstract term "ten
miles" meant quite so many weary steps. His feet felt numb, his calves
stiff and throbbing, his thighs already beginning to develop a charley-horse
that bid fair to double him up. And they had hardly begun to walk, he thought
glumly. He felt ready to collapse, after only half an hour's march.
"Think we're almost there?" he
asked Dominici.
The
stocky biochemist wrinkled his face in good-hearted scom. "You kidding? We haven't walked more than two and a half, three miles at most. Relax, Bernard. There's plenty going
ahead."
Bernard
nodded. A pace of ten minutes per mile was probably generous, he thought. Most
likely they had done no more than two miles—a fifth or a sixth of the journey.
And he was tired already.
But
there was no help for it but to plug gamely on. The day had all but begun, now;
the sky was bright and the sun seemed hidden just below the distant trees,
biding its moment until bursting forth. The air had grown considerably warmer,
too, the temperature climbing well into the sixties. Bernard had opened his
jacket. He dipped frequently into his canteen, hoping the water would last him
the round trip. Their last time here, Laurance and his men had tested the water
and found it to be unobjectionable H20, presumably readily
drinkable. But there had been no time for elaborate checks on microorganic
life. Improbable though it was that a nonterrestrial organism could have
serious effects on a Terran metabolism, Bernard was not minded to take chances.
At
the end of the first hour they rested, leaning against the massive stumps of
fallen trees.
"Tired?" Laurance
asked.
Stone
nodded; Bernard grunted his assent. A twinkle appeared in Laurence's eyes.
"So am I," he admitted cheerfully. "But we'll keep going."
The
sun rose finally a few minutes after they had resumed their trek. It burst into
the sky gloriously, a young sun radiant in its youth. The-temperature continued
to climb; it was above seventy, now. Bernard realized bleakly that it was
likely to reach ninety or better by high noon. He remembered that medieval
jingle: Mad
dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. He smiled at the thought. No more than once
or twice a year did he think of himself as an Englishman, even though he was
Manchester born and London bred. That was another
effect of a transmat civilization; it provided such marvelous motility that no
one really thought of himself as tied to one nation, one continent, even one
world. Only in
44
odd
little moments of sudden insight did it occur to Bernard to regard himself as
an Englishman, and thus in some nebulous way heir to the traditions of Alfred
and William and Richard the Lion-Hearted and Churchill and the other titans of
the misty past.
Mad
dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Dr. Martin Bernard flicked sweat from his
forehead and grimly forced his legs to continue carrying him forward.
SIX
It
became purely mechanical
after a while, and he stopped feeling sorry for himself and concentrated all
his physical and mental energy on dragging one leg after another after another.
And the yards lengthened into miles, and the distance between the spaceship
and the alien encampment shrank. Nothing like a ten-mile hike in seventy- or eighty-degree heat to teach
a 'transmat person what the concept of distance means, Bernard thought. He was finding out. Distance
meant sweat pouring down your face and trickling into your eyes; distance meant
the back of your boot gradually rubbing one of your heels raw; distance meant
that bunchy, cramped feeling in the fleshy part of your leg, the bitter aching
of your foot's small bones, the steady pain in the forepart of your thigh. And
this was only a,ten-mile hike.
"I wonder how good a hiker the Technarch is?" Dominici asked'irreverently.
"A damned good one, more likely than
not," Bernard muttered. "That's why he's a Technarch. He's got to be
able to outdo everyone in everything, whether
it's hiking or quantum mechanics."
"Still,
I'd like to see him out here sweating under this blasted sun, with . .
." The biophysicist paused. "They're stopping, up ahead. Maybe we've
arrived."
"I hope so. We've been marching close to three
hours."
45
Up ahead, the procession had indeed come to a halt. Laurance and his men had stopped at the summit of a gently rising
hill. Peterszoon was pointing into the valley, and Laurance was nodding.
As
Bernard caught up to them, he saw
what they were pointing at in the valley. It was the alien settlement.
The
colony had been built on the west bank of a fast-flowing river about a hundred yards wide. It nestled in a broad
green valley that was bordered on one side by the group of hills in which the
Earthmen now stood, and on the other by a wide, gently upcurving thrust that
rose into snub-nosed mountains several miles away.
In
the colony, furious activity seemed to be the order of business. The aliens
scurried like energetic insects.
They
had built six rows of domed huts, radiating outward from a larger central
building. Work was proceeding—no, boiling ahead—on other huts that would extend
the radii of the colony's spokes. In the distance, gouts of dirt sprang high as
the aliens, using what seemed to be a hand-gripped excavating device of
force-field nature, dug out the foundations for yet more of the six-sided,
stiff little huts. Others were working on a well on the landward side of the
colony, while still others clustered around curious machinery, unpacking crates
and dragging bulky devices (generators? dynamos?) across the clearing.
Some
thousand yards to the north of the main scene of activity stood a massive blue
spaceship—adhering in the main to the cylindrical form, but strangely fluted
and scalloped in superficial design to provide an unmistakably alien effect.
The spaceship stood open, and aliens streamed to and fro, bearing material out
of the big ship.
After
he had taken in the first surprising sight of the furiously energetic
colonizers, Bernard turned his attention to the aliens themselves, not without
a chill. At this distance, better than five hundred yards, it was hard to see
the creatures in great detail. But they bore themselves upright, like human
beings, and only their skin coloration and the odd free-swinging motion of
their double-elbowed arms bore witness to their unearthliness.
He could see that they came in two sorts: the
green ones,
46
which
were overwhelmingly in the majority, and the blue-skinned ones. These seemed to
be overseers; color-supremacy, he wondered? It would be interesting
sociologically to run into a species that still practiced color-dominance.
Perhaps these aliens would be surprised or revolted to learn of the presence of
two black men and a yellow one on the Archonate that ruled Terra, he thought.
Be
that as it may, the blue aliens were definitely in charge, shouting orders that
could just barely be heard on the hillside. And the green ones obeyed. The
colony was being assembled in almost obscene haste.
"We're
going to march down the hillside and right into that colony," Laurance
said quietly. "Dr. Bernard, you're nominally in charge of the
negotiations, and I won't question that—but remember that I'm responsible for
the safety of all of us, and my instructions''will have to be final, no
questions asked."
It
seemed to Bernard that Laurance was arrogating altogether too much
responsibility to himself in this expedition. The Technarch had never openly
stated that Laurance was to be absolute boss. But the sociologist was not
minded to raise questions of leadership at this point; Laurance seemed to know
what was best, and Bernard was content to leave matters at that. He moistened
his hps and looked down into the bustling valley.
"The
important thing to remember is not to show any sign of fear. Dr. Bernard,
you'll march in front with me. Dominici, Nakamura, Peterszoon, follow right
behind us. Then Stone, Havig, Clive, Hernandez. It'll be a kind of blunt-tipped
triangle. Stay in formation, walk slowly and calmly, and whatever you do
don't show any sign of tension or fear." Laurance glanced quickly around
the group, as if checking on their resources of courage. "If they look
menacing, just smile at them. Don't break
and bolt unless there's an out-and-out attack on us. Stay calm, level-headed,
and remember that you're Earthmen, the first earthmen ever to walk up to an
alien being and say "hello.' Let's do it the right way. Dr. Bernard, up
front with me, please."
Bernard
joined Laurance and they began the descent of the hill, with the others
following in assigned order. As he
47
walked,
Bernard tried to relax. Shoulders
back, legs loose. Get that stiffness out of your neck, Bernard! Inner tension
shows up on the outside. Look at your ease!
But
it was easier said than done. He was bone-weary from the long hike, and the
sodium-chloride tablet he had swallowed not long ago was taking its time in
replenishing the salt he had sweated out during the morning. There was the
physical tension of fatigue; and there was the far greater mental tension of
knowing that he was walking down a hillside into a settlement built by
intelligent beings who were not in the slightest
"human."
For
a long moment it seemed as though the aliens would never notice the nine
Earthmen filing toward them. The non-terrestrials were so busy with their
construction tasks that they did not look up. Laurance and Bernard advanced at
a steady pace, saying nothing, and they had covered perhaps a hundred paces
before any of the aliens reacted to their arrival.
The
first reaction came when a worker stripping felled logs happened to glance up
and see the Earthmen. The alien seemed to freeze, peering uncomprehendingly at
the advancing group. Then he nudged his fellow-worker in an amusingly human
gesture.
"They see us
now," Bernard whispered.
"I
know," Laurance answered. "Let's just keep on going toward
them."
Consternation
appeared to be spreading among the green-skinned workers. They had virtually
halted all construction now to stare at the newcomers. Closer, Bernard could
make .out their features; their eyes were immense goggling things, which gave
them a look of astonishment which perhaps they did not feel inwardly.
The
attention of one of the blue-skinned overseers had been attracted. He came over
to see why work had stopped; then, spying the Earthmen, he recoiled visibly,
double-elbowed arms flapping at his sides in what was probably a genuine
reaction of surprise.
He
called across the construction area to another blueskin, who came on a jogtrot
after hearing the hoarse cry. With cautious tread the two aliens moved toward
the Earthmen,
48
taking
each step with care and obviously remaining poised for a quick retreat.
"They're
just as scared of us as we are of them," Bernard heard Dominici mutter
behind him. "We must look like nightmare horrors coming down out of the
hills."
Only
a hundred feet separated the two aliens from Bernard and Laurance. The
remaining nonterrestrials had ceased work entirely; dropping their tools, they
were bunching together behind the two blueskins, staring with what seemed to
be apprehension at the Earthmen.
The
sun was merciless; Bernard's shirt plastered itself to his skin. He murmured to
Laurance, "We ought to show some gesture of friendliness. Otherwise they
may get scared and gun us down just to be on the safe side."
"All
right," Laurance whispered. In a louder voice he said, without turning his
head, "Attention, everyone: slowly bring your hands up and hold them
forward, palms outward. Slowly!
That might convince 'em
that we're coming with peaceful intentions."
Heart
pounding Bernard slowly lifted his arms and turned his palms forward. Only
fifty feet separated him from the aliens, now. They had stopped moving. He and
Laurance still led the slow, deliberate advance across the clearing under the
blazing sun."
He studied the two blueskins. They seemed to
be about the average height of a man, possibly a little taller—as much as six
feet two or three. They wore only a loose, coarsely woven, baggy yellow garment
round their waists. Their dark blue skins were shiny with sweat, which argued
that the aliens were metabolically pretty much like Earthmen, and their huge,
saucer-like eyes flicked back and forth from one Terran face to the next,
demonstrating not only curiosity but a probable stereoscopic vision-pattern.
The
aliens had no noses as such, merely nostril-slits covered with filter-flaps.
Their mouths were lipless; their faces in general had little fat, and it
seemed as if their skin were stretched drum-tight over their bones. When they
spoke to each other, Bernard caught glimpses of red teeth and a tongue so
purple it was practically black. So they differed from Earth-men in
pigmentation and in most of the minor details—but the
49
overall
design was roughly the same, as if only one pattern could serve for intelligent
life. Again alack of
choice, Bernard
thought with a philosophical detachment that surprised him as his trembling
legs continued to move him forward. The universe gives us the impression of free will, but in the really big
things there's only one possible way that things can be.
The
aliens' arms fascinated him. The double elbows seemed to be universal joints
that swiveled in any direction, making the aliens capable of doing fantastic
and improbable things with their arms. Chalk one up for alien engineering, Bernard thought. That arm combine&Ml the advantages of a
boneless tentacle and a rigid limb.
The
greenskins seemed to be very much like their blue overseers, except that they
were shorter and thicker of body. It seemed fairly obvious that the greens were
designed for working, the blues for directing.
A
third blue appeared, crossing diagonally from the side of the settlement to
join his two colleagues. The three aliens waited stonily, their strange faces
appearing to register determination in the teeth of this unforeseen invasion.
When they were ten feet
from the aliens, Laurance halted.
"Go
ahead," he muttered to Bernard. "Communicate with them. Tell them we
want to be friends."
The sociologist took a deep breath. He was
ironically conscious that nearly a thousand years of folklore spiraled down to
reach the level of reality here and now: this was the moment, first in all
recorded history, when Earthman walked up to non-Earthman and offered greeting.
He
felt limp. His mind spun. What to say? We are friends. Take us to your leader. Greetings, men of another world!
There
was no help for it, he thought. The old cliches had become cliches precisely
because they were
so damnably valid; what
else were you supposed to say when making first contact with nonterrestrials?
But Bernard felt self-conscious all the same, at this moment when cliche became
history.
He touched his breast and
pointed to the sky.
"We
are Earthmen," he said, enunciating each syllable with painstaking
crispness. "We come from the sky. We wish to be friends."
The words, of course, would
mean nothing to the aliens,
50
would be
no more than meaningless noises. But that was no excuse for not saying the.right words, all the same.
He
pointed to himself once more, and to the sky. Then, tapping his chest, he said,
"I." He pointed to the aliens, slowly, not wanting to alarm them. "You. I—you. I—you— friends."
He
smiled, wondering as he did so if perhaps the display of bared teeth might be a
symbol of fierce challenge to these people. This was far more delicate than the
meeting of two hitherto-separate cultures on ancient Earth. At least the same
sort of blood flowed in English sea captains and Polynesian chieftain; there
was the chance of a common biological ground. Not here. No previously accepted
value was worth anything here.
Bernard
waited, and behind him eight other earthmen waited, sharing his tension. He
stared levelly into the bulging eyes of the foremost blueskin. The aliens had a
faintly musty smell; not unpleasant, but intense. Bernard wondered how Earthmen
smelled to them.
Cautiously he extended his
hand. "Friend," he said.
There
was a long silence. Then, hesitantly, the nearest blueskin lifted his hand,
swiveling it upward in that startlingly fluid motion. The alien stared at his
hand as if it were not part of him. Bernard glanced quickly at the hand too: it
had seven or eight fingers, with a sharply curved thumb. Each finger sprouted
an inch-long blue nail.
The
alien reached out, and for a fraction of an instant the calloused blue palm
touched Bernard's. Then, quickly, the hand dropped away.
The
alien made a sound. It might have been a guttural grunt of defiance—but to
Bernard it sounded something like "Vvvrennddt!" and he took the sound
at face value. Smiling, he nodded at the alien and repeated: "Friend. I—you. You— I. Friend."
The
repetition came, and this time it was unmistakable. "VwrennddtV The alien seized Bernard's outstretched hand
and gripped it tighdy. Bernard grinned in triumph and satisfaction.
For better or for worse, the first contact
had been made.
SEVEN
Within
a week, there was
communication, of a rough, uncertain sort.
The
aliens caught the idea at once. They saw, without any coaxing necessary, that
one or the other group was going to have to learn the other's language, and
that the sooner the better. There was never any question of who was to learn
whose language. The aliens spoke a vastly inflected tongue that involved
variations in pitch, timbre, and intensity; aside from the mere matter of
grammatical complexity, it was obvious to both sides that Earthmen would be
dislocating their jaws in any attempt to reproduce the click, grunts, whistles,
and growls of the alien language. On physiological grounds it was impossible
for the Earthmen to learn the alien language; so the aliens would have to learn
Terran.
They
took to it readily enough. Havig, as the team's linguist, had charge of the
project, and for long hours each day the eight other Earthmen acted out
charades to demonstrate Terran verbs. It was sometimes maddening work,
especially in heat that hovered at the ninety-degree mark most of the day, but
Havig spared no one, least of all himself.
"Get
the verbs across and all the rest comes easy," he said over and over.
"Nouns are no trouble—just point to a thing and name it. It's the verbs we have to teach them first. Especially the abstract
verbs."
The
first session lasted nearly six hours. The three blue-skins who seemed to be in
charge of the colony squatted in a peculiarly uncomfortable-looking position,
heels digging into the backs of their thighs, while Havig jostled the sweating
Earthmen around, shouting instructions at them.
"Bendl
Bendl" The linguist turned to the aliens, indicated the frantically
bending Earthmen, and said, "To bend."
"Dhu benddh,"
repeated the aliens in turn.
It seemed impossible that a language could be
learned this
52
way—but
the aliens had retentive memories, and Havig approached the job of teaching
them as if it were his sacred duty in the cosmos. By the time the sun began to
dip toward the low hills behind the colony, several key concepts had been
established: to
be, to build, to travel. At least, Havig hoped they had been established. It certainly seemed
that way; but there was no certainty.
The
aliens seemed pleased with their new knowledge. They tapped their bony chests
and exclaimed, "I—Norglan. You— Terran."
"I—Terran. We—Terrans."
"Terrans come. Sky. Star."
Bernard
nodded to himself. Much as he disagreed with Havig's fundamental-ideas about
ancient cultures—and with his weird Neopuritan ideas about today—he had to
admit that the stringbean linguist had done a superb job in his first few
hours.
Night
was falling, though; and the day's heat was dwindling rapidly. Evidently this
was a zone of dynamic temperature contrasts, with the mercury cycling through
a range of fifty or sixty degrees a day.
"Tell
them we've got to leave," Laurance said to Havig. "Find out if they
have vehicles and can give us a ride back to our ship."
It
took Havig fifteen minutes to get the idea across, with the aid of much
body-moving and frustrated arm-gesticulation. The blueskins squatted calmly as
Havig performed, repeating words now and then as it suited their fancy.
Bernard looked forward dismally to another ten-mile jaunt shipward in cold and
darkness. But, finally, a spark of understanding glimmered; one of the
blueskins rose to his feet in a quick, anatomically improbable motion, and
barked stem orders to a waiting greenie.
Moments
later three small vehicles that looked much like landsleds came trundling
forward, each driven by a greenskin. The cars were little oval beetles sheathed
with what looked like copper, rolling along on three wheels. The blueskin whose
command of Terran was most secure pointed to the cars and said, "You. Terrans. Travel."
The cars were driven by some sort of
turboelectric gener-
53
ator,
and they seemed to have a top speed of about forty miles an hour. The
greenskins drove impassively, never saying a word, simply following in the
direction Laurance pointed out to them. When they came to streams, they simply
rolled on through like miniature tanks. The trip back to the XV-ftl took less than an hour, even figuring in detours round impassable wooded
areas. When the Earthmen stepped out of the little cars, night had fallen. It
was terribly quiet, the clamor of daytime life in the forest stilled for now.
'Bright, unfamiliar constellations speckled the sky with their strange
configurations. And a moon was rising—a tiny reddish sliver of rock, probably
no more than a hundred miles in diameter, arching up slantwise through the
night. It was rising rapidly, almost at a dizzying pace for men accustomed to
the more sedate behavior of Earth's own satellite. The greenskins left without
a word.
The
Earthmen were equally silent, as they clambered into their ship. It had been a
long, exhausting day; Bernard could not remember when he had ever felt wearier.
No academic responsibility had been this grueling. No personal tribulation had
exhausted him this much.
But even with the heavy weight of fatigue
numbing them all, it was impossible not to feel a deep, inspiring sense of
pride and accomplishment. Earth had come into contact with another race today,
an alien people, and there had been communication across the gulf that
separated them.
Inside
the ship, Martin Bernard sought out Havig—reluctantly, but out of inner need
that seemed imperative. The Neopuritan had hot loosened his tight black
surplice with its starched collar, but had simply sprawled out on his bunk
fully dressed.
Bernard stood above him. Havig's eyes were
open, but he did not seem to take notice of the sociologist. "Havig?"
Havig's glance flickered
upward. "What is it?"
Bernard
hesitated, fighting back the lingering compulsion to argue with the other man.
"I—I just wanted to tell you that I thought you did a splendid job
today," he said, getting the words out haltingly and with difficulty.
"We've had our differences in the past, Havig, but that doesn't keep me
from
54
offering you
congratulations on the way you handled the session today. I can recognize good work when I see it."
The
Neopuritan rose to a sitting position. His unyielding gray eyes bored into
Bernard's milder blue ones. In a firm, emotionless voice Havig said, "I
seek no congratulations for my work, Dr. Bernard. Whatever I may have
accomplished, I have done it only by virtue of God's working through me, and so
there is little credit for me to claim."
"But—well,
all right, so God worked through you," Bernard sputtered in surprise.
"But I still think you did a hell of—you did a swell job, and . . ."
"I
do not deserve your praise, Dr. Bernard. But I recognize the growth of spirit
that enables you to offer it." There was just the flicker of a smile.
"Good night, Dr. Bernard." Havig lowered himself to his berth once
again.
Bernard
blinked in bewilderment. He had been pleased to find the strength in himself
necessary to offer the congratulations; he had considered it a steep sacrifice
of pride. And, though his gesture had not met with utter rejection, it had
certainly been received indifferently by Havig. Bernard felt angered. He
started to say something.
Dominici
broke in gently, "Let him alone, Bernard. You've both made a step in the
right direction. Don't press things now. What do you expect him to do—smile and
say thanks? He doesn't think he deserves them."
"I could have saved my breath,
then," Bernard muttered.
He
turned away and readied himself for sleep. Havig, eyes closed, seemed already
soundly slumbering. Stone was making notes in a memorandum pad, and Dominici
was scrubbing himself under the vibroshower.
Bernard
stripped and joined the biophysicist beneath the invigorating molecular field;
a stream of ions peeled the day's grime and sweat from him.
Dominici said, "Don't fly off the handle
because he didn't beam at your congratulations. You did the right thing in
offering them. He was damned good out there today."
"Yes,
he was," Bernard agreed. "But the man's a congenital sourpuss. He
didn't have to give me the stone-wall treatment. He ..."
"He honestly feels he's just the tool
through which God
55
worked
today," Dominici said. "Save your breath and don't try to get him to
think differently. Just be grateful he was,, as good
as he was out there, and take the rest in stride."
Bernard
slipped into his bunk and wearily tried to relax. He attempted to put himself
behind Havig's forehead, wondering what manner of man it was who could so
renounce all the joy of life, all the pleasure of accomplishment, and so dourly
go through all his days garbed unsmilingly in black. No doubt diat Havig had
done a superb job today, absolutely first-rate; but was there really any moral
harm in accepting congratulations for what he had done? Maybe, Bernard thought,
Havig was one of those men who are unable to accept face-to-face praise without
acute embarrassment—and thus he took refuge behind the convenient mask of
selflessness that his creed provided him.
Bernard
closed his eyes, thumbing the throbbing eyeballs. He thought for a moment of
his own cozy life, the life he had left behind, the life that was as different
from Havig's as could be imagined. No doubt Havig would deem it scandalous,
maybe even blasphemous, to spend an evening listening to music, reading poetry,
and sipping brandy, when those hours could have been spent in prayer, contemplation,
or the performance of charitable deeds.
Yet
for all Havig's staunch discipline, he was no better in his specialty than
Bernard in his—and for all Bernard's self-indulgence, he was no worse in his
field than Havig in linguistics. I'm easy-going and hedonistic, maybe even a bit selfish, but Ym a good man in my field. As Havig is in his, except
when he starts mixing propaganda with his conclusions. It took a whole spectrum of personality types
to make up a culture, Bernard thought. He pondered Havig a while, wishing he
knew what motivated the man, whether he was really just a dull fanatic or if
there were more to him.
After a while, Bernard
slept.
When
he woke, it was only reluctantly. Nakamura was standing over his bunk shaking
him roughly.
"Time
to get up, Dr. Bernard." The sociologist stared blearily up at the
grinning face. "Commander Laurance says you've done enough sleeping,"
Nakamura said.
Commander Laurance was certainly right about
that, Ber-
56
nard had
to admit; a glance at the clock told him that he had slept just over eleven
hours. But his head still felt full of cobwebs, and he growled complainingly
as he knuckle-eyed himself into wakefulness.
It
was an hour past sunrise. The day on this planet was twenty-eight Terran
Absolute Hours and twenty minutes long. Still fettered by sleep, Bernard ambled
up front to join the others for breakfast.
Laurance
had already broken out the ship's two landsleds. When they had finished
breakfast, the Commander said, "We'll split up as follows. Clive, you're
going to pilot Sled One. Havig and Stone will go with you, also myself. Hernandez, you take the other sled. You'll be
driving Bernard, Dominici, Peterszoon, and Nakamura."
The
sled-ride took a little more than an hour. When the Earthmen had reached the
Norglan settlement, they saw that the scene was much the same as it had been
the day before: the builders were at work, their fierce energy undiminished.
The three blueskins who were involved in the language lessons came to greet the
band of Earthmen, offering a vocabulary display by way of salutation:
"I—you. Travel. Come. Here. We—Norglans.
You—Terrans."
Bernard smiled. Right now, the conversation
had an almost comic tinge; but he knew that even the attainment of these
halting, disjointed syllables was a staggering achievement. And it was only
the beginning.
After
three hours of instruction a pair of greenskins hesitantly approached bearing
trays of food—flat, coarsely glazed yellow plates on which were arranged slabs
of some sweet-smelling pale meat, and thick earthenware flasks of a pungent
black wine. Havig looked doubtfully at Laurance, who said, "Refuse, as
politely as you can. We don't want to touch anything until Dominici's had a
chance to do some analysis."
The
food was politely declined. The Earthmen produced their own supplies, and Havig
explained haltingly that it might not be safe for Earthmen to eat Norglan food.
The aliens seemed to comprehend.
During that day, and the next, and the next,
Havig labored tirelessly while the other Earthmen sat by, more or less use-
57
less
except to serve in verb-dramatizing charades. Bernard found the lengthy
sessions tremendously draining on his patience. There was little he could do
but sit in the broiling sun and watch Havig perform.
And
the performance was incredible. On the fifth day, the Norglans were putting
together plausible sentences out of a fund
of nearly five hundred words. And though they fumbled and forgot and became
confused some of the time, it was evident that they were fantastically quick
learners. Five words out of six seemed to stick the first time. And, of course,
the broader their linguistic base became, the simpler it was to teach them new
words.
By
the seventh day, enough of a mutual
understanding had been reached to begin negotiations in earnest. The first
order of business was setting up a place to meet; squatting in the open while
colony-building went on all around was not ideal. At Havig's suggestion, the
Norglans erected a tent in the middle of the colony area where further
discussion could take place.
As
the tent went up, the Earthmen smiled in relief. A week on this planet had left
them parboiled and blistered by the sun. The aliens did not seem to mind; they
sweated, but their pigmentation evidently protected them from any tissue damage.
Bernard, on the .other hand, looked more than a bit lobsterish. Dominici had begun to tan, but most of the other
Earthmen still experienced discomfort.
On
the ninth morning, negotiations began. Stone, it had been decided, would do the
actual talking, Havig would provide linguistic midwifery. Bernard would make
cultural observations, Dominici biophysical ones, that
would enable Earth to understand the aliens better. The Technarch had picked
his men with care.
In
the tent, a rough wooden table had been rigged. The aliens sat on their heels
at one side; apparently they had no use for chairs. The Earthmen, in the
absence of seats, adopted a crosslegged
squat.
Havig
said, "This Earthman is called Stone. He will talk to you today."
The
biggest of the three Norglans, who identified himself as Zagidh—whether that
was an honorific title or his personal
58
name,
there was no way of telling—said, "He is Stone called? I touch?"
An eight-fingered hand reached out and
grasped Stone's arm as it lay on the conference table. The chubby diplomat
blinked in alarm, then smiled as the Norglan prodded a fingertip into the soft flesh of his forearm.
Zagidh
released the hand and fixed all the Earthmen in a saucer-eyed glare. "Stone is hard. He is not-hard."
Havig said, "Stone is
label, not description."
The
alien puzzled that one over for a while. Dominici murmured, "Curse you for
having a name like that, Stone. We may never get past this point because you
aren't made out of granite."
But
the alien seemed to grasp the distmctiorr between a proper name and a nominal description within moments. Zagidh conferred
briefly with his two comrades, then said: "I am
Zagidh. You are Stone-label. But label is a not-truth."
It
took ten minutes more before Havig was willing to concede that Zagidh really
understood the point. The Earthmen fidgeted; if, thought Bernard, we
bog down on fine points like this, how are we ever going to get anything
important ever settled?
Stone
threaded a tortuous verbal path, with much help and correction from Havig.
After two hours he was dripping wet, but he had succeeded in establishing
several vital points:
That Earth was the nucleus
of a colonial empire.
That
the Norglan home world, wherever it was, was a similar center of colonial
expansion.
That
some sort of conflict between the two dynamic planet-systems was inevitable.
That,
therefore, it was vital here and now to decide which parts of the galaxy should
be reserved for Norglan and which for Terran expansion. ~^
Zagidh
and his companions wrestled with these four points and appeared to show a
complete understanding of what they meant. There was a brief but fervid
discussion between the three Norglans. Then the alien to Zagidh's left rose and
left the tent.
Zagidh
grimaced in the now-familiar facial agony that preceded any major statement of
his. The alien said slowly,
59
"This
is serious matter. I—we—do not hold authority. We-you can no further talk.
Others-we must come."
The
four sentences seemed to exhaust the Norglan. His tongue licked out, dog-like,
and he panted. Rising, he and the remaining blueskin exited without a further
word, leaving the startled Earthmen alone.
EIGHT
"What
do you figure this
means?" Stone asked uneasily. It was half an hour since the Norglans had
left the tent. A few curious greenskins had drifted past the tent to peer in at
the Earthmen, but their blue overseers had shouted them back to work, and since
then the Earthmen in the tent had not been disturbed.
"Obviously
Zagidh and his friends realized they'd stumbled into something too big for them
to handle," Bernard said. "Suppose you were a colonial administrator busy digging wells and building shelters,
and some alien beings dropped down out of the sky and told you they wanted to
hold a discussion about carving up the universe? Would you sit down and write
a treaty on your own hook—or would you pass the buck back to the Archonate as
fast as you could?"
"Yes—yes, of-course," Stone said.
"They've gone to get higher-ups. But how long will it take?"
"L:
they've got a transmat equivalent," Dominici pointed out, "it won't
take any time at all. And if not . . ."
"If not," Bernard
said, "we may be here a while."
They
fell silent. Bernard walked to the tentflap and looked out. Work was
proceeding, without a hitch. The Norglans were not ones for wasting time when
it came to setting up a colony, apparently.
There
was nothing to do now but wait. Bernard scowled. This entire mission was a
first-class education in patience. Laurance and his men sat quietly in the
comer, no longer
60
active
participants in the negotiations, simply letting the minutes trickle past.
Havig, with his Neopuritan self-control, showed no outward manifestation of
impatience.
"Anybody
bring a set of pyramid-dice?" Dominici asked. "We could get a good
game going in here."
"You'd
be offending Havig," Stone pointed out. "His people don't countenance
gambling."
The
linguist smiled thinly. "These sly remarks tire me. Do I actively
interfere with your behavior? I live by my own example—but I've never
maintained that you should do the same."
Bernard's
lips firmed tightly/ He found himself envying Havig's glacial self-restraint.
At least the linguist could sit quietly, almost as quietly as the spacemen,
waiting for the uncertain hours to pass.
Now
it was three hours since the Norglans had made their abrupt exit. Mid-afternoon
had come; a blistering shroud of heat lay over the clearing, but the greenskins
toiled on without seeming to mind. Inside the tent, the air was hot and hard
to breathe, and twice Bernard fought back the desperate temptation to guzzle
the remaining contents of his canteen. He rationed himself: a drop now, another
drop fifteen minutes later. Just enough to keep his parched
throat moist.
"Well
wait around until sundown," Laurance said. "If they don't come back
by then, we'll go back to the ship and try again tomorrow morning. How does
that sound, Dr. Bernard?"
"As
good a suggestion as any," the sociologist agreed. "Sundown's the
normal time for breakup of a meeting. They won't have any reason to get
insulted if we leave then."
"But how about the insult to us?" Dominici demanded with sudden warmth.
"These damned bluefaces just picked up without a word and left us to roast
in here all afternoonl Why the deuce should we be so concerned about their feelings, when they left us . . ."
"Because were Earthmen,"
Bernard said sharply. "Maybe they don't have the same ideas about
politeness. Maybe they don't see anything wrong with what they've done this afternoon.
We can't judge them by our own behavior norms."
"You sociologists don't seem to think
anyone can be judged
61
by any norms," Dominici retorted sourly. "Everything's relative,
isn't it? There aren't any absolute standards, you say. Just
individual patterns of behavior. Well, I say . . ."
"Quiet," Laurance
interjected. "Someone's coming!"
The
tentflap parted and three aliens entered. The first was Zagidh. Behind him came
two Norglans of massive stature, their skins a deep, rich bluish-purple. They
were clad in elaborate gem-encrusted robes, and their entire bearing was regal.
Zagidh sank into the familiar heels-to-thighs squat. The newcomers remained
standing.
Grimacing
terribly, Zagidh said, "Two—kharvish—have
come from Norgla. To speak. Time taken—learning the Ter-ran talk.
They-we will talk to you."
Still squatting, Zagidh duck-waddled out of the tent. The two big Norglans lowered themselves now
in one smooth simultaneous motion into the standard squat.
The
Earthmen regarded them uneasily. Bernard gnawed his lower lip. These two
obviously were Very Important Norglans indeed.
Haltingly, but in a voice whose tone was the
mellow boom of a fine 'cello, one of the big Norglans said, "I am label
Skrinri. He is label Vortakel. He—I—we both—label kharvish. How you say? One-who-comes-to-talk-to-others-of-other
kind."
"Ambassador,"
Havig suggested.
Skinri repeated it, making the big word his
own. "Ambas-sa-dor. Yes. Ambassador.
I label Skrinri, he label Vortakel, he-I-we label ambassador. From Norgla. From home planet."
"You speak Terran very well," Stone
said in widely separated syllables. "Were you taught by Zagidh?"
"No—meaning . . ."
"The past
participle," Havig murmured. "They don't know that one. Try, Did Zagidh teach you?"
"Did Zagidh teach you Terran?" Stone asked.
"He teach
him-I-we," Skrinri affirmed. "We are here since highest of sun."
"Since noon," Havig translated.
Stone said, "You have come to talk to us?"
"Yes. You are from Earth. Where is Earth?"
62
"Much distant," Stone said.
"How can I convey it to him, Havig? Would he know what a light-year
means?"
"Not
unless he knows what a year is first," Havig said. "Better let it go
by."
"Okay,"
Stone said. Facing the Norglans he said, "Your world is close?"
"All
worlds are close. It takes no time to travel there to here."
Stone
looked around, startled. "So they've got a transmat tool"
"Or something that has
the same effect," Laurance said.
Sweltering in his comer of the tent, Bernard followed the
evolving chain of reasoning. One thing was certain: these
two Norglans were pretty special, perhaps as far above Zag-
idh and the other blueskins in general superiority as the
blueskins were above the green laborers. Skrinri and Vortakel
learned the language with enormous speed, picking up hints
of pronunciation and sentence order from byplay between
the Earthmen as well as from the formal statements Stone
framed. _
Gradually,
the similarities between the two empires began to unfold.
The
Norglans had the transmat, it seemed: Skrinri and Vortakel had come from the
mother world only a few hours ago via some form of instantaneous
transportation. The spaceship looming above the settlement was testimony that
the Norglans also had some form of conventional space travel, probably a
near-light drive but nothing faster-than-light.
Concrete
information on distances was a good deal more difficult to elicit. But it was
reasonable to guess that the home world of the Norglans was somewhere within
three or four hundred light-years of the present planet, maybe less, probably
not more. Which meant that the Norglan sphere of colonization
was roughly of the same order of magnitude as the Terr an.
So much was clear. But yet the real issue had
hot even been mentioned yet. Stone was working up to it closely, building a
dazzling pattern of ideas and communicated information before he got down to
actual business.
As they spoke, Bernard followed every word,
trying to
63
construct a
picture of the Norglans as a people that might be of some use in further
negotiating. They were a stratified race, that was
certain: the variation in color was not simply a difference in pigmentation but
one of complete genetic makeup. The greenskins were shorter, stocker, and
evidently not intellectually gifted; they made ideal workers for this kind of
labor. The blueskins were shrewd, good organizers, quick thinkers—but they
lacked the inner authority, the decisiveness of personality,
that marked a true leader. The big bluish-purple ones had the necessary
strength.
Were
they the top of the pyramid? Or did they, in turn, depend for guidance on some
still more capable kind of Norglan? How far did the stratification extend?
No
telling; but it was likely that Skrinri and Vortakel represented pretty close
to the pinnacle of Norglan evolution. If there were others who came much better, then the Norglans would be further along the scale
of development than they were.
Outside
the tent, night was falling. The temperature drop came swiftly. A cold wind
scudded across the clearing, flicking open the tentflap. Hunger-sounds growled
in Bernard's belly. But the Norglans showed no indications of wishing to
suspend negotiations for the night; as for Stone, he was in his element now,
tirelessly advancing the chain of communication until he could bring the
discussion to its vital point.
And
that moment was approaching. Stone was sketching diagrams in the packed-down
dirt floor of the conference tent, a dot with a circle around it: Earth's
sphere of colonization. At a distance of several yards, another dot, another circle: Norgla's sphere.
Beyond
those, other dots; no circles. These were the un-colonized stars, the terrae incognitae of the galaxy, which neither Earthman nor
Norglan had reached at this stage of the galactic expansion.
Stone said gravely, "Earth people spread
outward from Earth. We settle on other worlds."
He drew radial spokes projecting from the
circle that was the Terran sphere of dominance. The spokes reached into the
neutral area.
"Norglan people spread outward too. You
build your colonies, we build ours."
Spokes
grew from the Norglan sphere as well. Dragging his stick doggedly through the
ground, Stone extended the Norglan spokes until some of them all but grazed
Terran ones.
"You
settle here," Stone said. "We settle there. We continue settling new worlds. Soon this happens . . ."
Stone
sketched it graphically. Two spokes met, crossed. Others intersected as well.
"We
reach the same territory. We fight over this world or that. There would be war
between Earthman and Norglan. There would be death. Destruction."
Skrinri
and Vortakel stared at the diagram on the ground as if it were the symbology of
some complex rite. Their fleshless faces gave no hint of'the thoughts passing
through their minds. The Earthmen waited, silently, hardly daring to draw a
breath.
Vortakel
said slowly, "This must not happen. There must be no war between Earthman and Norglan."
"There must be no
war," Stone repeated.
Bernard
leaned forward, chafing a little at his role as a spectator, but as tense as if
he were conducting the negotiations and not Stone. Despite the chill, despite
the hunger, he felt a pounding surge of triumph swelling in his breast. The
aliens had understood; there had been two-way communication; the Norglan
ambassadors realized the grave dangers of war. The conflict would be averted.
The paths of empire would swerve from their collision course.
Stone said, "We must choose the way of
peace. Norglan leaders and Terran leaders will meet. We will divide the stars
between us." He paused, making sure the
ambassadors comprehended the meaning of divide. "We
will draw a line," Stone went on, emphasizing his words by scratching a boundary between the two spheres of dominion on the ground. Quickly he
scuffed out with his foot those Norglan spokes that projected into the Terran
side of the line, and those Terran spokes which
overreached the boundary in the Nor-glan's direction.
Stone smiled. "All these worlds"—he
made a sweeping gesture over the left-hand side of
his sketch—"will be Nor-
65
glan. No Terrans will settle there. And on this
side"—he indicated the Terran doman—"no Norglans may come. These
worlds will be Terran."
He waited for some response
from the Norglans.
The
aliens were silent, peering down at the lines scrawled in the dirt. Taking
their silence for lack of understanding, Stone repeated his suggestion.
"On this side, all worlds to be Terran. On this, all Norglan.
Do you understand?"
"We understand,"
said Skrinri slowly and heavily.
The
wind whipped furiously at the tent, whacking the loose flap back and forth.
Rising from the squat he had maintained with so little discomfort for so long,
Skrinri stepped forward to tower over Stone's diagram.
Carefully
placing one huge bare foot over the lines, the Norglan rubbed out the boundary
Stone had drawn to delimit the proposed Norglan and Terran sectors. Then,
kneeling, Skrinri obliterated with his fingers every one of the spokes of
expansion Stone had depicted as radiating from the Terran sphere.
A
moment before Skrinri spoke, Martin Bernard divined
what the Norglan was going to say. A cold hand seemed to clutch at the
sociologist's throat. The triumph of an instant before vanished like a snuffed
flame.
Skinri's
voice was level, somber, without any hit of malice. He made a broad gesture
with both hands, as if to take in the entire universe.
"Norgla
builds colonies. We expand. You—Earthmen— have occupied certain worlds. You may
keep these worlds. We will not take them away. All other worlds belong to
Norgla. We do not have to talk further."
With
calm dignity, the two Norglans made their way from the tent. In the shocked
silence that followed, the wind rose to a mocking screech.
All
other worlds belong to Norgla. Stunned, the nine Earth-men stared white-faced at each other; no one had
expected this.
"It's
a bluff!" Dominici whispered harshly. "Limiting us to present
holdings? They can't mean it!"
"Perhaps they
can," Havig said quietly. "Perhaps this is the
66
end of
our fine dream of galactic colonization. And perhaps this is a disguised
blessing. Come: we'll accomplish no more here today."
The
Earthmen filed out of the tent, into the alien darkness, into the suddenly
hostile wind.
NINE
Morning
came slowly. The little red
moon twirled across the sky and was gone; the unfamiliar constellations passed
above and lost themselves beyond the horizon. As the hours of night gave way to
the hours of dawn, blackness to grayness, chill to morning warmth, the men of
the XV-ftl busied themselves in the routine tasks of
daybreak. No one had slept that night aboard the ship. Cabin lights had burned
through till dawn, as Earthmen too weary to sleep argued and reargued the
aspects of the situation.
"We
shouldn't have let them march out of there like that," Stone said
bitterly, cupping his plump cheeks with plump hands. "They stalked out
like a couple of princes giving the word to a rabble of commoners. We should
have made them stay, let them know that Earth wasn't going to listen to their
high-handed nonsense."
" 'You may keep these worlds,' " Dominici repeated in harshly sardonic tones. " 'All other worlds belong to Norgla.' As if we
were worms!"
"Perhaps
it was the will of God that man's expansion through the heavens come to a
halt," Havig suggested. "The Norglans may have been sent as a
reminder that pride is sinful, that there are limits beyond which we dare not
go."
"You're
making the assumption that the Norglans are a genuine limit," Bernard
said. "I don't think they are. I don't think they've got the technology to
keep us penned into our present sphere. They sound like bluffers to me."
"I'll go for that idea," Dominici
said. "What I saw of their
67
science
didn't impress me. They've got spaceships and trans-mats, but nothing that's
qualitatively advanced over what we've got. In a war we could hold our own with
them, I'm sure."
"But why a war?" Havig asked. "Why not accept the decree and keep within our
limits?" He answered his own question immediately, cutting off Dominici's
hot outburst. "I know. We do not accept limits because we are Earthmen,
and in some mysterious way Earthmen have a divine mandate to spread throughout
the entire universe." Havig smiled darkly. "None of you pay attention
to what I say, of course. You think I'm a religious crank, and in your eyes I
suppose I am. But is it so utterly wrongheaded to be humble, gentlemen? To
draw back our frontiers and say, Thus far and no farther shall we go? When the
alternative is bloody warfare, is it cowardly to choose the path of
peace?"
Bernard
looked up. "Ill grant the strength of what you're saying, Havig. None of
us wants war with these people, and maybe it isn't man's destiny to colonize
the universe. I can't answer for what is or isn't our destiny. But I know
enough about psychology to figure these people out, alien though they are.
Right now they're being tolerant, in a lordly way— they'll let us keep our
piddling little empire, provided we leave all the rest for them. But their
tolerance won't last forever. If all the rest of the universe becomes Norglan,
some day they're going to cast covetous eyes at us and decide to make it a
clean sweep. If we give ground now, we're inviting them to come wipe us out
later. Dammit, Havig, there's a difference between being humble and being
suicidally meek!"
"So
you think we should make war on Norgla?" the linguist asked.
"I
think we should go back to them today and let them know we aren't going to let
ourselves be bluffed," Bernard said. "Reject their ultimatum. Maybe
that's simply their alien way of negotiating: begin with an absurd demand and
work backward to a compromise."
"No,"
Dominici said. "They want war. They're spoiling for it. Well, we'll give
it to 'em! Let's tell Laurance we're pulling out of here, heading for home.
We'll toss the whole business in the Archonate's lap and wait for the shooting
to start"
68
Stone shook his head mildly. "Bernard's right, Dominici. We have to go back and try
again. We can't just go storming off to Earth like hotheads, or even go meekly
crawling away with our tails dragging, as Havig would like. We'll give it
another try today."
The
cabin door opened, and Laurance, Clive, and Hernandez entered. They, too, had
been up all night, or so it looked from their paleness of face and redness of
eye.
Laurance
forced a smile. "It's almost morning. I see you haven't done much
sleeping."
"We've
been trying to figure out whether we ought to try another session with the
Norglans," Bernard said.
"Well? What was the
decision?"
"We
aren't sure. Matter of fact, we seem to be split down the middle on the
subject."
"What's the point of
disagreement?" Laurance asked.
"I
feel it's time for mankind to pull in its horns," Havig said with an
apologetic smile. "Our friend Dominici wants to go home too, but for the
opposite reason: he doesn't think it's worth talking to the Norglans
again."
"Damn
right I don't," Dominici snapped. "They've as much as told us they
dare us to make war. Now we ought to show them . . ."
"I'm
willing to withdraw my objections to another session," interrupted Havig
calmly. "Something in me suggests that going home now would lead only to
war. I join forces with Dr. Bernard and Mr. Stone. Let's talk to the Norglans
again."
Bereft
of his ally, Dominici stared around uncertainly. All eyes were on him. After a
moment he frowned, turned up his hands, and said grudgingly, "All right.
I'll make it unanimous, I suppose. But we aren't going to get anywhere,
talking to them."
"Is
it definite, then?" Laurance asked. "We stay here at least another
day?"
"Yes," said
Bernard. "At least another day."
Breakfast
was an uneasy meal; after the long night of debate and doubt, no one had much
of an appetite. Bernard munched the synthetics Nakamura dished up, making himself swallow most of what was set before him
more out of a sense of duty to his body than out of any real hunger. His
69
face
felt rough and stubbly; shaving entailed looking into the mirror, and he was
not pleased by what he saw there. The sleekness was gone. His face looked
pouchy, now; dark circles shadowed his eyes, and his skin seemed to droop. Some
of the drooping, he knew, could be laid to the gravitation here, which was
fractionally more than Earthnonn. But the real villains were fatigue and
despair.
They
set out an hour after sunrise for the .Norglan settlement. The heat was
beginning already. Plants whose leaves had rolled tight against the evening
frost now uncoiled them, spreading them flat to soak in the sunlight.
Everywhere on this untouched planet, life seemed to blossom. Only in the valley
where the Norglans camped was the natural beauty marred by the activity of
civilization.
And,
Bernard thought bleakly, the Norglan colony was the plague center from which
the corruption of civilization would spread outward, until some day every inch
of virgin land would have yielded to the builders. Some day this wilderness
world would be like Earth, civilized down to its final micron of land. Bernard
silently shook his head. Havig was wrong; it was insupportable to think of
retreating to the established bounds of the Terran sphere and abandoning an
entire universe of fresh green worlds to the Norglans. For someday the new
worlds of the Terran system would be old worlds; there would be skyscrapers on
Betelgeuse XXIII, and the Terran system would boil with life, and there would
be no place to go, for all else would be Norglan.
Nol
Bernard thought sharply. Better to drag both empires to flaming doom tomorrow than hand our
descendants' birthright to the Norglans!
The
day was hot by the time the Terran sleds reached the outskirts of the alien
encampment. Tirelessly the greenskins were working. An entire new ring of huts
was under construction; the Norglans were building as if the speed with which
they erected their settlement was a vital matter.
The
Earthmen strode into the center of the colony together, Bernard, Stone, and
Laurance leading the way. The greenskins had lost interest in them by now; work
continued without any show of curiosity. But a blueskin that Bernard recognized
as Zagidh came forward to meet them.
70
"You have come back," Zagidh said
flady.
"Yes.
We wish to talk with Skrinri and Vortakel again," said Stone. "Tell
them we are here."
Zagidh
swung his swivel-jointed arms loosely. "The khar-vish are gone."
"Gone?"
"We-they told we-I they did not talk to
you-they again," Zagidh said.
Stone frowned, puzzling out the complexities
of the blue-skin's version of Terran. "We had not ended talking to the kharoish. Get them as you did yesterday."
Zagidh's
arms continued to swing. "I can do not. They did not want to talk to
you-they again."
From
the back of the group came Dominici's bitter voice. "They've delivered
their ultimatum and now they're gone. We're wasting our time jabbering with
this blueface. Do we have to have things made any clearer for us?"
"Quiet,"
Bernard warned him. "Let's not give up quite this soon."
Patiently,
Stone tried it from several other approaches. But the result was the same.
Skrinri and Vortakel were gone, back to the mother world; they had nothing
further to say to the Earthmen. And no, Zagidh would not summon them a second
time. Why should he? The position was plain enough. Skrinri had ordered the
Earthmen not to colonize any more worlds. Did tjjat statement require any
clarification, Zagidh asked?
"Don't
you see this will be war between Norgla and Terra?" Stone demanded,
exasperated. "Innocent people will die because of your stubbornnessl We have
to talk to the kharoish, again."
Zagidh
swung his forearms faster, now; it looked like a gesture of growing irritation.
"I have said the words they gave me to say. I must build now. You go. The kharvish do not come back."
With-
one final annoyed flap of his arms, Zagidh spun away and instantly began to
shout instructions to a group of greenskins struggling across the clearing with
a heavy crate of equipment. The Earthmen, ignored, stood by themselves unshaded
in the fierce sunlight, while the building of the colony continued all around
them.
"I think that's about it," Bernard
said quietly. "We've had it. Maybe they're bluffing, but they're bluffing
hard."
"Poof! The big boys can't be bothered to talk to us!" Domin-ici growled.
"Go away, little Earthmen, you bother us! They're asking for war!"
"Perhaps
that's what they want," Stone said. "Or else they simply think we'll
be obedient little creatures and go home to stay within the boundaries they
allow us."
"This
comes as punishment for our pride," said Havig. "We were alone in the
universe too long. In solitude a man develops strange fantasies of
power—fantasies that collapse when he leams he is not alone."
Laurance
said quietly, "I guess we go back to Earth, genüe-men. Or do you want to
talk to Zagidh some more before we leave?"
Bernard
shook his head. "There isn't anything else we could say to him."
"We
might as well leave here," Stone added sadly. "We're up against a
dead end. The Archonate will have to decide what happens next—not us."
They
returned to the sleds, and drove slowly out of the Norglan encampment. Turning
to glance back, Bernard saw that nobody was watching their departure. None of
the Norglans cared.
They
traveled through the rolling meadows and over the
by-now well-worn forest path to the ship. Bernard's heart felt like cold lead
behind his ribs. He shuddered at what they would have to tell the Technarch
when they returned to Earth, only a few days hence. McKenzie would be furious;
perhaps the galaxy would blaze into war almost at once, as soon as production
models of the faster-than-light ship could be turned out.
"So
we're going to war," Stone said. "And we don't even know who we're
fighting, really."
"And
they don't know who we are," Laurance pointed out. "Well be like
blind men jabbing in the dark. Our main objective will be to find Norgla,
theirs to find Earth."
"What
if they don't have faster-than-light ships?" Bernard asked. "They
wouldn't be able to reach Earth, but we'd be able to strike at them."
"Until
the first time they captured one of our ships," Laur-ance said. "But
they must have f-t-1. Otherwise they couldn't risk war
so lightheartedly."
From
the front of the sled, Clive chuckled. "You know, we could have gone along
for thousands of years without ever running into these Norglans. If we hadn't
built the XV-ftl,
if we hadn't happened to
blunder onto a Norglan-settled planet, if the Technarch hadn't decided to
negotiate in advance of the conflict. . ."
"That's a lot of ifs," Bernard said.
"But
they're valid ones," Clive protested. "If we'd minded our own
business and expanded at a normal rate, none of this would have happened."
"That's
pretty close to treason your man is talking," Stone said quietly to
Laurance.
"Let
him talk," the spaceman replied with a shrug. "We've listened to the
Archons all along, and where's it getting us? Just back into the same muck of
war that the Archonate was established to abolish, so . . ."
"Laurance!" Bernard snapped.
Laurance
smiled. "So I'm talking treason too? All right-hang me
on the tree next to Clive. But this will be Technarch McKenzie's war
we'll be fighting, by the Hammerl And win or lose, it
may bring the Archonate tumbling down."
TEN
Laurance's
defiant words remained with
Bernard as he boarded the ship and made his way to the passenger cabin to await
blastoff. It was not often that you heard anyone openly expressing antagonism
to the Archonate, especially when the outburst came from someone like Laurance.
Bernard realized with surprise that the little interchange had jangled his
nerves more than it had any right to do. We're conditioned to love and respect the Archonate, he thought
73
And
we don't realize how deep that conditioning lies until someone rubs against it.
It
was strange to think of criticizing the Archonate or a specific Archon. To do
so was virtuafly to demonstrate an atavistic- urge to return to the dreadful
confusion of pre-Archonate days. And such a return, of course, was inconceivable.
The
Archons had ruled Earth since the dim days of the early space age. The First
Archonate had risen out of the nightmare anarchy of the twenty-second century;
despairing of mankind, thirteen strong men and true had seized the reins of
command and set things aright. Before the Archonate, mankind had been
splintered into nations forever at each other's throats, and the stars waited
in vain. But Merriman's invention of the transmat had made possible the rise of
the Archonate, with Merriman himself as the First Technarch, five centuries
gone. And man had yielded to oligarchic rule, and the Archons had goaded man to
the stars.
And,
training and choosing their own successors, the Archonate had endured, a
continuing body holding supreme authority, by now almost sacred to Terrans of
whatever planet. But Martin Bernard had studied medieval history; the pattern
of the past argued that no empire sustained itself indefinitely. In time each
made its fatal mistake, and gave way to a successor.
Was
the cycle of the Archonate ended now, Bernard asked himself as he waited for
blastoff? A month ago such a thought would never have occurred. But perhaps
McKenzie—one of the greatest Technarchs since Merriman, all admitted—had
overreached himself, had committed the sin the Greeks knew as hubris, by spurring man into breaking the bounds of
the limiting velocity. McKenzie's rash thrust into interstellar space now
threatened to bring war down on Terra—war whose outcome might shatter the
peace of five centuries and cast the Archonate into limbo with the other
discarded rulers of man's eight thousand years.
Nakamura
entered the cabin. "Commander Laurance says he's ready to go. Everybody
cradled down for acceleration already?"
Here we go homeward like whipped curs, Bernard thought,
74
He
checked the straps of his protective cradle. They were bound fast.
The
signal came not much later. With landing jacks and stabilizing fins retracted,
the XV-ftl sat poised in its meadow, while ten miles
away unheeding aliens built their colony. A thunder of ions drove the ship
upward, until the green planet dwindled and became nothing but a dot against
the flaming backdrop of its nameless sun. Within the ship, Bernard lay back,
his body involuntarily tensing against the push of three gravities as the XV-ftl sprang away from the planet below.
Time
passed. The sociologist did not think; to think meant to rehearse the catalogue
of their humiliation, to repeat silently the account of their treatment at the
hands of Zagidh and Skrinri and haughty Vortakel. He waited, mindlessly hanging
in a void, as the ship's velocity increased with each continuing instant of
acceleration.
Acceleration
ceased at last. Velocity became constant. They could relax.
Peterszoon
entered their cabin to inform them that the conversion to no-space was
imminent. The big Hollander, taciturn as always, conveyed the bare information
and left. Peterszoon had made it quite clear from the start that he had no
interest in this journey, even less in the four passengers. He had been ordered
by the Technarch to serve in the crew, and serve he did; but the Technarch's
orders said nothing about serving with a smile.
Some
time later, the warning gong began to sound. Bernard went tense. They were
entering the no space void, which meant that less than a day hence they would
be landing on Earth. He found no joy in the thought of homecoming. In the ancient days, he thought, a messenger who bore bad news was killed on the spot. We won't be as
lucky. We'll go on living—known for all time as the men who let ourselves be
walked over by the Norlgans.
Just
before conversion came, Bernard turned to catch a final glimpse of the solar system behind
them. They had not quite left the vicinity of Star NGCR 185143; it glimmered on
the screen with an appreciable disk the apparent size of an iron five-credit
piece, and dimly visible against its brightness were the dark dots of
occulting planets. Then the cabin
75
lights
flickered and the screen winked into featureless gray-ness. Bernard felt the
pang of separation from the universe he knew.
Conversion had been made.
Now
there would be seventeen hours of unending waiting. Bernard found his cabinet
and took out a slim book. His symmetrical existence of teaching and reading and
brandy-sipping seemed infinitely distant now, but he hoped to recapture some
of the ease he had known before being plunged into this nerve-draining mission.
Shall
I compare thee to a Summer's day? Thou art more lovely
and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's
lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And
often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime
declines, By chance or nature's changing ...
Bernard sighed in frustration and let the
book slip shut. It was no use; no use at all.
"What are you
reading?" Dominici asked.
"Not are. Were. I cant
concentrate."
"What was it,
then?"
"Shakespeare. Medieval English poet."
"Yes,
yes, I've heard of Shakespeare!" Dominici said. "He was one of the
really great ones, wasn't he?"
Bernard
smiled mechanically. "The greatest, some think. I've got a book of his
sonnets here. But it's no use, reading them. I keep remembering that Shakespeare's
dead twelve centuries; the face of Skrinri keeps getting between me and the
page."
"Hand
it here," Dominici said. "I've never read any of that old stuff.
Maybe I'll like it."
Shrugging,
Bernard gave him the book. Dominici opened it at random, and almost immediately
began to scowl. He looked up after a moment.
"I
can't read it! Don't tell me you've been reading him in the original? What is this, Greek? Sanskrit?"
76
"English,"
Bernard said. "It's a hobby of mine, studying old languages. But go ahead;
look at each word, pronounce it phonetically if you can. Shakespeare's English
isn't that far removed from modernday Terran. It just looks strange. But that's the direct ancestor of our own language, you
know."
Dominici
frowned, muttered a couple of words aloud experimentally, and gave up.
"It's hopeless. Even if I could figure out all the words, I'd never get
the sense. Take it back."
Bernard
retrieved his book. Odd, he thought; he had taken naturally to old English, and
read it without a hitch now. But, he had to admit, it was not really very much
like contemporary Terran. Hundreds of years of transmat civilization had
blended the languages of Earth into one homogeneous tongue, founded on English
but vastly different.
It
was strange to think of a time when men had spoken hundreds of different
languages, thousands of subdialects. But so the world had been, not many
centuries ago. Only the transmat, enabling a person to outstrip the lightning
in his travels, ensured the continuing uniformity of Terran language and
culture everywhere.
He
put the book away. Concentration was impossible; too many extraneous fears
intervened. His hands were cold with tension. He paced the narrow cabin. The
viewscreen showed nothing but gray; it was impossible to tell that they were
moving—but they were, incalculable strides each
fragment of. a moment, plunging on toward Earth.
Bernard
did not want to see the Technarch McKenzie's face when he received the news of
the Norglan ultimatum. He wished there were some way of submitting a written
report instead. But there would be no help for it; they would have to report in
person. It would be an ugly little moment, Bernard was certain.
The
cabin was silent. Havig was sunk in that impenetrable cloak of abstraction of
his, communing with his God; no use seeking company there. Dominici had gone to
sleep. Stone stared at the viewless vision screen, no doubt thinking of his
shattered diplomatic career. A man who goes forth to negotiate a treaty and
returns with an enemy ultimatum jammed down his gullet does not rise to the
Archonate.
Bernard made his way forward, past the walls
studded
77
with
rivets, past the galley, into the control cabin at the nose of the ship. The
door was open. Witfiin, he could see all five of them at work, parts of the
same organism, extensions of the ship. For minutes, no
one took notice of the sociologist as he stood at the entrance to the control
cabin peering at the flashing lights, listening to the droning click of the
computer.
Then Laurance-saw him. Turning, the Commander's eyes narrowed; his face, Bernard thought,
looked strangely rigid, almost tortured.
"Sorry, Dr. Bernard. We're very busy. Would you mind remaining in your cabin?"
"Oh—of course. Sorry
to intrude . .
Rebuked,
Bernard returned to the passenger half of the ship. Nothing had changed. The
clock showed that nearly fourteen hours of no-space travel remained.
He
was growing hungry. But as the clock-hands crawled on, no one^appeared from the
crew to announce that it was meal-time. Bernard waited.
"Getting hungry?"
Stone asked.
"Plenty. But they looked busy up front when I went fore," Bernard said.
"Maybe they can't take time out for a meal break yet."
"We'll
wait another hour," Stone decided. "Then we eat without them."
The
hour went by, and half an hour more. Stone and Bernard went fore. Tiptoeing
past the galley, Bernard glanced into the control cabin and saw the five
crewmen as frantically busy as ever. Shrugging, he stole away again, unnoticed.
"They don't look as if they plan to
eat," he told Stone; "we might as well help ourselves."
"What
about the other two?"
"Dominici's asleep, Havig's meditating.
They can eat whenever they feel like it, after all." "You're
right," Stone agreed.
They
fell to, dishing out the synthetics. Nakamura kept the galley spotlessly,
everything in its place. Staring into the storage cabinets, Bernard discovered
with some surprise that the ship carried enough food to last for months. In case of emergency, he thought automatically. Then he checked himself.
Emergency? For the first time he realized that the XV-ftl,
78
was an
experimental ship, that faster-than-light travel was in its puling infancy.
He
prepared the synthetics with something less than Naka-mura's culinary skill,
and they ate a silent meal. It was the seventh hour of no-space travel by the
time they finished. In less than half a day, the XV-ftl would wink back into the familiar universe somewhere near the orbit of
Pluto.
Returning
to the cabin, Bernard settled himself in his bunk. Dominici had awakened.
"Did I miss lunch?" he wanted to know.
"The
crew's too busy to take a break," Stone said. "We made lunch
ourselves. You were sound asleep, so we didn't wake you."
"Oh. Okay."
Dominici
went forward to see about his meal; after a moment, Havig followed him.
Bernard lay back, nestling his head on his hands, and dozed for a while. When
he woke, six hours remained; he was hungry again.
"You
haven't missed a thing," Dominici assured him. "They're awfully busy
up front."
"Still?" Bernard asked. He began to feel uneasy.
The
hours trickled away. Three hours left, two, one. He
counted minutes. The seventeen-hour no-space interim had expired. They ought to
be converting back, but no news came from the control cabin. Conversion was
twenty minutes overdue, thirty minutes. An hour.
"Do
you think there's some reason why we should spend more time in no-space on the
way back than on the way out?" Stone asked.
Dominici
shrugged. "In no-space theory almost anything goes. But I don't like this.
Not at all."
When
they were three hours past the conversion time, Bernard said through lips dry
with tension: "Maybe we ought to go up front and find out what's
what?"
"Not yet," Stone
said. "Let's be patient."
They
tried to be patient. Only Havig succeeded, sitting wrapped in his unbreakable
calm. Another hour went by, more tortuously than any of the others. Suddenly
the gong sounded, three times, reverberating through the entire ship.
"At last,"
Bernard muttered. "Four hours late."
79
The lights dimmed; the indefinable sensation
of transition came over them, and the viewscreen blazed with light. They had
returned to the universe!
Then Bernard frowned. The
viewscreen . . .
He
was no astronomer, but even so he spied the wrongness. These were not the
constellations he knew; the stars did not look this way in the orbit of Pluto.
That great blazing blue double, with its attendant circlet of smaller stars—he
had never seen that formation before. Panic swirled coldly through him.
Laurance
entered the cabin suddenly. His face was paper-white, his lips bloodless.
"What's
going on?" Bernard and Dominici demanded in the same instant.
Laurance
said quietly, "Commend yourselves to whatever gods you happen to believe
in. We went off course the moment we converted yesterday. I don't know where we
are —but it's most likely better than a hundred thousand light-years from
home."
ELEVEN
"You mean
we're lost?" Dominici asked, his voice rising to an
incredulous screech. "I mean just that."
"Why
didn't you tell us about this before?" Bernard demanded. "Why did
you leave us to stew here in uncertainty all this time?"
Laurance
shrugged. "We were making course compensations, trying to find our way
back to the right path; but it didn't work. There wasn't even a trace of a
single one of our course referents. And everything we did only seemed to make
things worse. In the final analysis we really don't know the first bit about
faster-than-light navigation." Laurance's shoulders slumped wearily.
"We decided to give up trying, a httle
SO
while
ago, and converted back to the normal universe. But there isn't a single
familiar landmark. We're as lost as can be."
"How
could such a thing happen?" Stone wanted to know. "I thought our
course was pre-set—everything calculated automatically in advance . . ."
"To
a certain extent, yes," Laurance agreed. "But there were the minute
adjustments, the position feedbacks, and somewhere along there we went astray.
Maybe it was a mechanical failure, maybe a human error. We don't know."
"Does it matter now?" Bernard said.
"Hardly. A millionth of a second of parallax error-widening
into an enormous departure from course almost instantly. And so—here we
are."
"Where?" Stone asked.
"The
best I can offer you is an educated guess. We think we've emerged from no-space
somewhere in the region of the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Hernandez is busy
taking observations now. We've spotted one star we're pretty sure is S
Doradus, and that would clinch things."
"So
we're not too far from home," Dominici said with a harsh chuckle. "Only in the next galaxy,
that's all. What's a mere 50,000 parsecs?"
"If we know where we are," said
Stone, "shouldn't we be able to find our way back to Earth?"
"Not
necessarily," Laurance replied. "No-space travel doesn't follow any
logical pattern. There's no correlation between time and distance, and no way
of telling direction. We're traveling blindfolded;' the best we can do is send out an experimental ship unmanned, track its course,
find out where it goes, and then duplicate the course. Only we don't have any
unmanned ships to send out. Our only hope for getting home is trial-and-error
computation—and it's just as reasonable to assume that on our next jump we'll
wind up in Andromeda as back in our own galaxy."
"But we'll give it a
try, at least," Bernard said.
"I'm
not so sure we ought to. Right now we're in a galaxy very much like our own. We may be wiser simply to pick out an
Earth-type planet and settle there, rather than go shooting off into no-space
again and pos'sibly ending up stranded between galaxies, slowly starving to
death."
81
"Better to starve in the attempt to
reach home," Havig said, breaking his silence, "than to waste away on
some strange world."
"Probably
you're right," Laurance agreed. "But we'll have to think things out
very carefully before we rush ahead and do anything. We have about three
months' food on board ship. So we have some time to play around before we have
to start looking for a habitable planet. I . . ."
Nakamura
entered the cabin suddenly. In a low voice he said to Laurance,
"Commander, could you come up front for a moment? There's something we'd like to show you."
"Certainly. Excuse me, gentlemen."
The
spacemen left. For a long moment there was silence in the cabin after they had
gone, v
Bernard
stared at the vision screen. It was a breathtaking view: a sprawling field of
stars, a Milky Way no human eyes had ever seen before. Blazing blue-white giants
and dim red stars studded the field of vision. And down in the lower part of
the screen hung a dazzling
white cloud, a coil with an arm drifting loose at either end. With a jarring
sense of shock Bernard realized he was looking at his own galaxy. Somewhere
within that seemingly tightly packed mass of light lay Sol, and the thousands
of worlds of the Terran system; in there, too, were the Norglan worlds, and as
many millions more of uninhabited, unexplored planets. And there they all were, both rival empires and perhaps all the intelligent
life of the universe, looking at this distance like a bright blotch the size of
a man's hand.
Bernard
caught his breath. It was a numbing sight to see the galaxy from a distance of
some 50,000 parsecs. It tended to provide a different perspective on things, to
demonstrate beyond the power of all words to convey how small was man and all
his aspirations, how unintelligibly mighty the universe. At this distance, no
single star of the home galaxy could be discerned by the unaided eye. And yet,
in that inconsequential cluster of stars in the comer of the screen, how many
grandiose plans for universal conquest were bom before each sunrise?
Stone
laughed, bitterly, mirthlessly. "Which is worse, anyway?" he asked.
"To get lost out here fifty thousand parsecs
82
from
home—or to return to Earth with the Norglan ultimatum? Me, I almost think I'd
rather stay lost, and at least not have to bring that kind of news home."
"Not
me," Dominici retorted without hesitation. "I'm not in the same boat
you are. If we got back home, I'd survive the Technarch's anger, and maybe I'd
be lucky enough to live through the war with the Norglans. At least if I died
it wouldn't be a lingering death. I can't buy your preference for staying lost.
It wouldn't have been so bad with a couple of women on board, maybe, but to be
stranded this way, on the edge of nowhere? Nine Adams and no
Eves? Uh-uh. Not for me, friends."
Ignoring the discussion, Bernard continued to
stare at the alien sky in the vision screen.
Ten
thousand light-years had seemed so far from home, once. A
staggering distance, inconceivably vast. But it wasn't, not really, not
when you put matters into their proper perspective. Earth and Norgla were
virtually next-door neighbors when you stood this far away and looked back. Bernard smiled ironically. And to think that we and the Norglans were
all set to divvy up the universe between us! What cosmic arrogance, what
supreme gallL What right do any of us, in our puny
little galaxy, have to stake even a tentative claim out here?
"How about you, Bernard?" Dominici asked. "You haven't been
saying much. What do you think of Stone's idea? Would you rather stay lost out
here, or be the bearer of evil tidings?"
"Oh,
I'd like to get back home," Bernard said mildly. "No doubt about it.
I miss my books, my music, I even miss my teaching
chores."
"No family?"
Dominici asked.
"Not
really." Bernard leaned back. "Two marriages; both dissolved. I have
a son somewhere, by my first wife. David Martin Bernard, that's his name. I
haven't seen him in fifteen years. I guess he doesn't use my last name. He's
been raised to think that someone else is his father. If I met him on the
street, he wouldn't know me even by name."
"Oh,"
the biophysicist said in embarrassment. "Sorry to bring it up."
Bernard shrugged. "You don't have to
apologize. It's not a
83
wound
that rankles in my bosom, anything like that. I simply wasn't cut out to be a
family man. Can't get myself sufficiently involved with other
people except on non-practical levels of scholarship or connoisseurship or the
like. More's the pity I didn't realize that before my first marriage,
that's all." Bernard wondered why he was saying all this. "It wasn't
till the second marriage broke up," he went on,,
"that I realized that temperamentally I was a born bachelor. So I've got
no family ties with Earth. But I'd still like
to get home, all the same."
"I
guess we all do," said Stone. "I didn't really mean what I said a few
minutes ago. It was just a thought off the top of my head."
"I
was married once too," Dominici said to no one in particular. "She
was a lab technician with golden hair, and we honeymooned in Farrarville on
Arcturus X. She died ten years ago."
And
you obviously haven't gotten over it, Bernard thought, seeing the sudden anguished look on Dominici's face.
The
sociologist felt uncomfortable. Up till now there had been a certain
understanding of reserve in effect between the four of them; cooped up though
they were, they had kept back details of their private lives. But if it all
came spilling forth now as a relief from stress, all the long sad autobiographies
of frustrations and petty disappointments and lost loves, the situation in the
cabin would be intolerable. Each man would clamor to spew out his
autobiography, while the others would wait their rums. And, Bernard knew, it
would be his fault for having touched Off the
revelations.
Stone
had caught it now. "I never married," he was saying, "so in a
sense I don't have much to go home to. Not that there wasn't a girl, but it
didn't work out, and—well, it doesn't matter. I don't want to rot for the rest
of my life on some strange planet half the universe away from Earth. To die
unmoumed, alone, forgotten .
"It
would be the will of God, wouldn't it?" Dominici asked. "Everything's
the will of God. You just sit back and let God pour trouble all over you, and
you shrug your shoulders stoically because it's His will and therefore there's
just no use complaining." Dominici's voice had taken on a shrill, flippant
edge. "Isn't that so, Havig? You're our expert on God.
84
How come you haven't been spouting your usual
stuff to console us? We—Havig!" Bernard swung around.
It
was a startling sight. Sitting by himself, as usual, in his comer bunk, taking
no part in the conversation, the lanky Neopuritan was very quiedy having what
looked like a fit
of hysterics.
Like
every other aspect of the man, even his very hysteria was subdued, repressed.
His body was being racked with great whooping sobs, but Bernard realized that
he was choking them back with an almost demonic intensity of concentration. His
eyes were wet with tears; his jaws were tightly clenched, his white-knuckled
hands gripped the edge of the bunk. The sobs rippled up through him, and grimly
he forced them back, not letting a sound
escape from his mouth. The conflict between discipline and collapse was
evident. The effect was totally astonishing.
The
three other men were frozen in surprise a moment. Then Dominici snapped curtly,
"Havigl Havig, what's the matter with you? Are you sick, man?"
"No—not sick,"
Havig said, in a low, dark, hollow voice.
"What's
wrong, then? Is there anything we can get for you? Do'for
you?"
"Leave me alone,"
Havig muttered.
Bernard
stared at the Neopuritan in consternation. For once, the sociologist felt that
he had penetrated Havig's mask and understood.
"Can't
you see what he's thinking?" Bernard said quietly to Dominici and Stone.
"He's thinking that all his life he was a good man, kept the ways of God
as he saw them, worked hard, prayed. Worshipped Him as
he thought He must be worshipped. And—and then this. Lost here, billions and billions of miles
from home, church, family. Wife. Children. Gone,
and why? He's breaking up under that. He doesn't know why."
The
big man rose and took two tottering steps forward, eyes fixed, jaws flecked
with spittle.
"Grab
him!" Dominici shouted in panic. "He's cracking upl Grab him or he'll
run wild!"
Without wasting another second, all three
sprang toward
85
him.
Bernard and Stone each grabbed one enormously long, spidery arm; Dominici
reached up, straining practically on tiptoes, and clamped his hands to the
linguist's thin shoulders. Together, by sheer force, they pressed him down onto
his bunk and held him there.
Havig's
eyes blazed with indignant fury. "Let go of me! Get your hands away from
me! I forbid you to touch me, do you hear?"
"Just
lie there until you're calm," Bernard told him. "Relax, Havig. Don't
snap now."
"Watch him,"
Dominici murmured.
But
Havig was not resisting now. He glowered at the floor and muttered in a
broodingly introspective voice, "I have committed some sin—I must have—otherwise
why would this have happened? Why has He forsaken me—forsaken all of us?"
"You're not the first to ask that
question," Dominici said. "At least you're in good company
there."
A
blasphemous quip at a time like this infuriated Bernard for reasons he did not
fully understand. "Shut up, you idiot," he whispered harshly.
"You want to drive him out of his mind? Get me a sedative for him."
"In
some way I have offended Him unknowingly," Havig went on. "And He has
taken his light from me. My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken us?"
Bernard
felt a wave of pity and compassion so intense that it startled him. This was a
man he had once despised for mysticism and fanaticism, a man he had once
attacked in print in terms that he now saw had been vicious and petty— and, now
that Havig's shell of faith seemed about to shatter, Bernard felt deep pity.
Bending
over Havig, he said sharply, "You're wrong, Havig. You haven't been
forsaken. This is a trial—a trial of your faith. God is sending tribulations
upon you. Remember Job, Havig. He never
lost faith."
Havig's
eyes brightened, and a faint smile broke through the
despair. "Yes, perhaps," he said sofdy. "A
trial of my faith—of my faith and yours, too. As Job,
yes. But how can we stand it? Lost out here—perhaps God has turned his
face from us—perhaps . . ." He fell silent, and tears rolled down
86
the gaunt cheeks. Havig looked up imploringly at
Bernard, all the old self-willed strength seemingly gone, and began to shake.
Reaching
behind him, Bernard deftly took the sonic spray-tube from Dominici and jammed
it against a vein in Havig's thin arm.
He
flipped the release, injecting the fluid instandy. Havig muttered something
unintelligible and shivered; his eyes glazed; within moments, he had relaxed
and was on his way to sleep.
Rising,
Bernard mopped the beds of sweat from his forehead. "Whewl I wasn't
expecting that
to happen. And it came on
so suddenly ..."
"Crazy.
Absolutely crazy," Stone said. "How could someone so unstable get
sent aboard on this mission?"
Bernard
shook his head. "Havig's not unstable, despite the performance we just
saw."
"What is he if not
unstable, then?"
"All
this was perfectly understandable. He's a man who's built his entire life
around one solid set of beliefs. And he's lived those beliefs, not just talked about them. Call him a fanatic, if you
want; I certainly called him enough names. Well, he had the rug yanked out from
under him. I guess this was one time he couldn't write every trial and
tribulation off to God's will and endure it stoically. He ran out of explanations.
So he snapped."
"Will
he be okay when he wakes?" asked Dominici. "Or will he take up where
he left off?"
"I
think he'll be all right. I hope so. I gave him enough of that stuff to keep
him out for hours. Maybe he'll be calmer when the drug wears off."
"If
he goes on ranting like that," said Stone, "well just have to gag
him. Or keep him drugged, for his good and ours. He'll drive us all nuts
otherwise."
"I
think hell get his balance back," Bernard said. "He's too
fundamentally solid to go off the deep end."
"I
thought you called him a crackpot," Dominici objected. *Are you going off the deep end too?"
"Maybe I understand Havig and his
beliefs a little better now," Bernard said quietly. "Well, whatever.
We just have to
87
sell him
on the Job theme when he wakes up. If we can get that idea across to him, he'll
be a tower of strength from now on, and there won't be any more crackups."
"Job? What's that?" Stone asked.
"Figure
from the Judaeo-Christian religious books," Bernard said. "It's a
very good poem, really. It tells how the Devil made a bet with God that this
man Job would lose his faith under stress, and so the Devil was permitted to
visit all manner of plagues and calamities on Job. Things
that make getting lost in space look perfectly mild. But Job stood his
ground all the same, never weakening in his faith even when things looked
blackest. And eventually .
The
cabin door opened. Commander Laurance entered, followed by Clive and Nakamura.
"What's
been going on back here?" Laurance asked. "I heard wild shouting . . ."
"Havig went off his
rocker," Dominiei said.
"What?"
"It's
not quite that
desperate," Bernard said quickly. "He was simply having a fit of
despondency. The universe suddenly became too much for him all at once, or something, and his control snapped."
"He do
any damage?"
"No,"
Bernard said. "We got him down on his bunk fast enough. He's conked out
under sedatives now, and I think he'll be okay when he wakes."
"It sounded like a riot from up
front," Clive said. "We thought you were murdering each other back
here."
Not
that you'd mind if we did, Bernard thought. So
long as we didn't jeopardize your safety.
"He'll
be okay," Bernard said again. "What's the news from up front? Have
you figured out where we are yet? Or is it classified information?"
Laurance
looked sharply at him and said, "Greater Magellanic Cloud."
Dominiei glanced up.
"Is that definite?"
"About
as definite as it's going to get," Laurance said flatly. "We've found
S Doradus, bright as a beacon. And some RR Lyrae variables
that we're pretty sure of. The way the stellar population scans out—plenty
of Cepheids, lots of O and
88
B stars and K-type
supergiants, it fits
the Magellanics, all right."
"But how about Sol-type suns?" Stone asked anxiously. "Have you found
any of those yet? These other lands aren't any good for landings, are
they?"
"I
don't think we have to worry much about that," Laur-ance said with a tight
little nervous smile.
"What do you
mean?" Dominici asked.
"I
mean that matters don't seem to be in our hands any longer," Laurance
said.
For
the first time, Bernard realized what should have been immediately obvious to
him—except that it was the sort of thing nobody would expect to look for. He
became aware that all five of the crewmen had left the control cabin at the
same time. That had never happened before on the voyage. Yet Laurance, Clive, and Nakamura were in here, and Peters-zoon and Hernandez were waiting
just outside. And if no one were in the control cabin . . .
"What's
happening?" Bernard demanded in sudden panic. "Who's piloting the
ship?"
"I
wish I knew," Laurance said. He walked to the vision screen. "About
half an hour ago some external force seized control of us. We're powerless to
move of our own free volition. We're being dragged down as if by an invisible
hand— toward a yellow sun right up here."
TWELVE
Down, down, dropping through the blackness past
glittering suns, pulled like a helpless plaything—and there was nothing any of
them could do about it. Aboard the XV-ftl nine
men waited impotently.
The controls were jammed; the plasma jets
would not fire; the stabilizer rockets were out of commission; the velocity in-
89
dicators did
not register. It was not even possible to switch to the Daviot-Leeson drive and
convert into no-space. Nothing to do but wait.
Silently.
What could be said? This was beyond comprehension, beyond reason. And beyond control.
"Postulate
an enormous magnetic field," Dominici suggested. "Something like
fifty trillion gauss—a field of an intensity we can't
even begin to imagine. The magnetic field of the entire cluster, maybe. And
we're caught in it. Being dragged down."
"Magnetic fields don't interfere with a
spaceship's rocket tubes," Bernard said. "They don't freeze the
controls. Not even a hyper-zillion gauss field of the kind you're trying to
postulate. There's intelligence behind this, I say—and maybe it's intelligence
as far ahead of ours as your imaginary magnetic field is beyond anything we've
ever measured."
In
his bunk, Havig stirred, moaning incoherently. He slumped back without breaking
through the threshold of consciousness.
"How fast are we moving?" Stone asked.
Commander
Laurance looked up, a taut, white-lipped figure. "I can't tell. We're
going plenty fast. The boys are trying to draft some doppler
measurements up front. I'd say we're going pretty close to light velocity."
"Without
accelerating," Nakamura said dolefully. "Right from
a standing start to C, without acceleration. You figure it out. I give
up."
The
conversation petered out. In the vision screen, the stars rushed blindingly
toward them, their disks streaking and changing color, and sped past.
Laurance's vectors had been accurate: they were heading toward a yellowish sun
that grew by gigantic bounds with each passing instant.
Onward
and onward they sped. An hour of this involuntary journey had passed; a second
came, went, and a third. Hernandez reported that he estimated their velocity,
reckoning by observed doppler ships, at about nine
and six nines out of ten that of light. Which meant that they
were traveling at virtually the ultimate speed of the normal universe—with no
apparent source of velocity.
It was incredible.
It made no sense.
It continued to make no sense for the next
three hours. By that time, Havig had awakened. The linguist sat up with a start, shaking his head.
"What... ."
"Feeling better,
Havig?"
"What's
been going on? You're all looking at me so strangely. What's happened?"
"Nothing
much," Bernard said. "You got a little upset; we had to dope you up
with an ampoule of quicksleep. Are you feeling calmer now?"
Havig
passed a quivering hand over his forehead. "Yes-yes, the terror came over
me. I want to apologize. And— Bernard, I've got to thank you for trying to
comfort me. It was a generous thing to do, and I admire the effort it cost you.
The Job analogy—yes, that was it exactiy ..."
"It seemed that way to
me, too," Bernard said.
Havig
smiled. "I suppose one can hold one's self under control only so long, and
then one's strength gives out—even if one is strong, or thinks he is. I behaved
like a weakling, a coward. But it was an important experience for me. It showed
me that my faith can still be shaken. Shaken, though not
destroyed. Do you see, now, as I do, that God may sometimes withdraw His
gifts and grace for our best interests—though we may not see His purpose
clearly? Job did not understand, but he obeyed. As I should
have done, but for my moment of weakness—but now I have come through the trial
stronger than ever. It is the test of faith which confirms . . ."
Havig stopped and smiled sheepishly. "But I mustn't spoil my thanks by
turning them into a lecture. I beg your indulgence for the scene I
created."
"Forget
it, Havig," Dominici said. "We've all been taking turns at having
tantrums. You've been holding everything in, and it all exploded at once."
Havig
nodded. "Yes. But thank you, thank you so much. However—there's something
you're keeping from me, something new that happened while I slept. I see it in
your faces. You all look so pale, so frightened . . ."
"We better tell
him," Dominici said.
"Go on," Stone
urged.
As concisely as he could, Bernard explained
the situation
91
as it
now stood. Havig listened gravely, frowning more deeply with each sentence.
"So
we're out of control," Bernard finished bluntly. "That's the long and
short of it. We just have to sit tight. There's not a damned thing we can do
otherwise but wait and see what's going to happen to iis. If there ever was a
time for your Neo-puritan brand of stoicism, this is it."
"Now
we must all be courageous," Havig said firmly. "We must all of us
realize that what is destined for us is destined for our good, and we must not
fear it."
Bernard
nodded. He was beginning to see the real Havig now, a man who was austere and
gloomy enough,, certainly, but who, despite his
ascetic ways, was somebody Bernard could respect. Not agree with, but respect.
There was a solid core of strength in Havig. He didn't use his belief as a
crutch to help him limp through life, but as a guide that enabled him to meet
existence squarely and honestly. Which was a realization that
Bernard knew he would not have been capable of before this voyage.
He
felt relieved. Evidentiy Havig's momentary lapse from control was over, a brief
hysterical flare that had died down as quickly as it had arisen.
Dominici
whispered to Bernard, "I think you were right about the Job deal. He's
going to pull out of it."
"He
has pulled out of it," Bernard answered.
"He's tougher than you think."
It
was comforting, Bernard thought, to know that once again there was one man on
board who was utterly calm, fatalistically resigned to whatever might come. No, Bernard corrected. Not fatalistically. Wrong word. He's much too
cheerful now. Faith and resignation aren't the same
thing.
For an hour more the plunge continued, until
it seemed as though it might go on forever, an endless drop, Lucifer's fall
stretched out to infinity—or until the ship vanished into the yellow sun that
was its destination.
The
men aboard forced themselves to ignore the situation. It was too far from
control to worry about.
Nakamura
prepared a meal; they ate, without enthusiasm. Give produced a sonic
synthesizer and played old folk tunes, singing along with them in a nasal,
rasping voice that achieved
92
a
surprising quality of artistry. Bernard listened to the words of the songs,
fascinated: many of them were in the old languages of the nations of the Earth,
the buried tongues of the medieval world, and the snatches the sociologist
could understand were tantalizingly delightful.
But eventually even the singing wore thin.
Clive put the synthesizer away. All pleasure had been drained from the pastime.
It
was impossible to forget for very long that the ship was out of control,
carrying its helpless passengers impotently to almost certain fiery doom.
It
was impossible to forget that they were coping—or trying to cope—with forces
beyond all imagining.
It
was impossible to five under such conditions. But they continued to live.
And then the Rosgollan came
aboard.
Laurance
and the crew were up front, all five of them wrestling vainly with the
controls, only a hollow hope of regaining mastery over the ship spurring them
on. In the passenger compartment time'passed slowly. Bernard read a while
without absorbing, then tiredly laid his book aside to
stare fixedly into nowhere.
His
first inkling that something strange was about to happen came when he sensed a
sudden glow streaming from the rear corner of the cabin, about from the region
of Dominici's bunk. The strangely luminous golden-brown light filtered through
the cabin. Frowning, Bernard turned to see what was causing it.
Before
he had turned halfway round there came the harsh, panicky wail of Dominici's
voice.
"Mary,
Mother of God, protect mel" the biophysicist cried. "I'm losing my mindl"
Bernard mouth sagged open
as he saw.
A figure had materialized in the cabin,
directly behind Dominici's bunk. It hovered, some three or four feet off the
ground, at the intersection of the planes of the wall. From the figure the
sudden glow was radiating.
It
was a being of small stature, perhaps four feet high, poised calmly in the air.
Although it was completely without clothing, it was impossible to consider it
as being naked. A
93
garment of
light enfolded it, sofdy streaming light that blurred the figure beneath
without actually concealing it. Its face was a thing of shifting planes and
maddeningly coalescing angles; after only a moment of looking at it, Bernard
found himself growing dizzy, and he shifted his gaze lower.
The
creature radiated not only light but an impression of total serenity, complete
confidence, utmost ability to perform any act.
"What—the
deuce—is it?" Stone asked in a strangled voice. Dominici was prostrate,
speaking rapidly to himself in a low monotone. Havig, still
in control of himself but plainly shaken, knelt, praying. Bernard gaped.
"You
must not be afraid," said the visitation. "You will not come to
harm."
The
words were not spoken aloud. They simply seemed to stream from the creature's
body as clearly and as unmistakably as its radiance.
Despite
the quiet command of assurance, Bernard felt a sickly wave of terror sweep over
him. His legs began to give way, and he sank down limply onto his bunk, hugging
his arms together. He knew, beyond a doubt, that he was in the presence of a
creature as far surpassing man as mankind surpasses the apes. And perhaps the
gap was unimaginably greater than that. Bernard felt awe, reverence, and above
ail else a great resonating chord of fear.
"You
must not be afraid," the creature repeated, every
word precise and distinct. For an instant the light it radiated grew more
intense, deepening in hue to a warm maroon. Bernard felt the weight of fear
lifting from him.
He
looked up hesitantly and asked, in a thick, fumbling voice, "What—are
you?"
"I
am of the Rosgollans, Earthman. I shall be your guide until we land."
"And—where are we
being taken . . .?"
"To Rosgolla, Earthman." The answer was bland, forthright, and
totally noninformative.
Bernard
shook his head. It's
all an hallucination, that's the answer, he thought grimly. It's the only explanation. Even in the
Greater Magellanic Cloud they simply don't have beings
04
that can
come drifting through the solid walls of
a spaceship and who speak perfect Terran. He struggled to his feet.
"Dominici!"
he barked. "Get upl Havig! Get off your knees! Can't you see it isn't
real? We're having an hallucination, all of us!"
"Do you really believe that?" the
Rosgollan asked gendy. There .was the hint of an amused laugh. The quiet voice
said without malice, "You pitiful little creatures, so arrogandy deciding
for yourselves what may and what may not be called real! Far more exists in the universe than Earthmen may ever understand, even
though you think you hold dominion over all. We are not hallucinations. Far from it, Earthman."
Bernard's cheeks burned. He bowed his head,
thinking, .... more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. . .. He bit his lip and remained silent.
Peals
of enormous silent laughter thundered through the cabin now. The strange being
seemed vasdy amused by the pretensions of the humans. "We were like you,
once, Earth-men—hundreds of thousands of your years ago. We were eager,
questing, brawling, foolish, petty little beings. Even as you
are today. We survived that stage of our development. Perhaps you shall,
too."
Stone
looked up, his face pasty-white. He moistened his lips and said, "How—how
did you find us? Was it you that caused us to get lost?"
"No,"
replied the Rosgollan. "We watched you from afar as your race developed,
but we had no desire for contact with you. Until the moment came when we
learned that a ship of yours was approaching our galaxy. We feared, at first,
that you had come seeking us—but we saw at once that you were lost. I was sent
to guide you to safety. There is much you must be told."
"Where—how . . ."
Stone stammered.
"Enough,"
the Rosgollan said, in a firm tone that brooked no debate. "The,-answers
will come to you later, all in due course. I will return."
The light winked out.
The Rosgollan was gone.
The vision screen showed the yellow sun
swelling to cover an entire quadrant of space.
In
the cabin, four frightened men stared at each other in confusion and dismay.
Stone
found words first. Wild-eyed, he asked, "Did we really see it?"
"Yes,
we saw it," Havig said. His face was even more grim than usual. "It
appeared there in that corner. It glowed. It spoke to us."
Bernard
abruptly began to laugh. It was a dry, thin, ratcheting laugh that held little
mirth. The others frowned at him.
"He's amused,"
Stone said.
"What's the
joke?" Dominici asked.
"The
joke's on us," Bernard said. "On all of us in this
cabin, and on the Norglans, and on poor old Technarch McKenzie too. You
remember what Skrinri and Vortakel told us? The terms of the
ultimatum?"
"Sure,"
Stone said. He imitated the tone of the Norglans. "Yo« may keep these worlds. All other worlds
belong to Norgla.'"
"That's
right," Bernard said. "In a puffed-up huff of cosmic pride, we came
across space to the Norglans, magnanimously offering to divide the universe
equally with them. In even greater pride, they sent us packing. And who were
we, any--way, to say, This universe is ours? Insects!
Apes! Lowly grubbing creatures of no particular
importance!"
*We are men," Havig
said stoutly.
Bernard
wheeled to face the Neopuritan. "Men!" he
mocked. "You talk about knowing the ways of God, Havig. What do you know?
What does God care for you, for all of us? We're an insignificant part of
creation. If He exists, he regards us as just another life-form. Nothing special about us. We're worms in a puddle, and
because we happened to be the lords and masters of our particular puddle we
tried to say we owned the cosmos!"
"Hold
on a minute here, Bernard," Dominici protested. "Is it your turn to go nuts now? What are you trying to tell us, anyway?"
In a quiet voice Bernard said, "I'm not
really sure what I
96
want to
say—yet. But I think I see what's ahead for us. I think we're going to be put into our true
slot in the order of things. We're not lords of creation. We're hardly even
civilized, in the eyes of these people. Did you hear what the Rosgollan said?
They were like us, a few hundred thousand years agol On their time-scale, it's
only a couple of minutes since we came down from the trees, just two or three
seconds since we learned how to read and write, just a fraction of an instant
since we got even the slightest control over our environment."
"All
right, all right," Dominici said. "So they're greatly advanced . .
."
"Greatly?" Bernard shrugged. "The difference is inconceivable. The
evolutionary gulf between that—that being and us is so tremendous we can't
begin to imagine it. It's enough to knock some of the arrogance out of you,
isn't it, to find out that you're not really king of the heap?"
"Earth
will be in for some surprises," Havig remarked quietly.
"If we ever get
back," said Dominici.
"Earth
will be in for surprises, all right," Bernard said. "Surprises
enough to upset the applecart with a crash. We had it good too long.
Supreme masters of all we surveyed. It was bad enough finding the Norglans
cluttering up our nice universe—but now, on top of that, to run into these people . . ."
"And
who knows what other races there may be?" Stone said suddenly, a trace of
wildness in his eyes. "In Andromeda, in the other
galaxies? Creatures far beyond even the Rosgollans . . ."
It was a numbing thought.
Bernard
looked away, feeling a kind of dizziness at the sudden revelation of the
universe's immensity. Man was not alone. Far from it.
And on planets incredibly distant, older races thrived and watched the brash
newcomers. Bernard's eyeballs throbbed; his throat was dry, his lips gummed together.
He
could still see, in his mind's eye, that weird golden glow. Could still hear
the calm, assured voice ringing in his
97
mind.
Could still remember the infinitely humiliating words .
..
"Let's go up front," he suggested.
"We ought to tell Laurance about it."
"Yes, we should,"
Stone said.
They
made their way fore. But there was no need to tell Laurance the story of the
strange visitation. The crewmen were sitting in their cramped cabin looking
dazed and shaken.
"You saw it too?"
Dominici asked.
"The Rosgollan?" Laurance said. "Yes. Yes, we saw it too." His voice was
utterly flat.
Clive
began to giggle. It began as a ratcheting hoo-ha sound deep in his chest,
rising rapidly in pitch until it approached hysteria. For an instant no one
moved. Bernard strode quickly across the cabin, grabbed Clive by the bunched-up
collar of his shirt, and slapped him three times, hard, without pause.
"Stop itl Cut it out, Clive!"
The
giggling stopped. Clive blinked, shook his head, rubbed
his flaming cheeks. Bernard stared down in surprise at his fingers, which still
tingled with the impact of the blows. He realized it was the first time in his
life he had ever struck another human being. But it had been the sensible thing
to do; if not checked, Clive's giggling might have infected them all within
moments. Just now all of them rode the thin edge between sanity and madness.
Bernard moistened his lips.
"We can't let this
crack us up!"
"Why not?" Laurance asked tonelessly. "It's the end, isn't it? The finish for all our big talk of galactic empires? Now we
know just how insignificant we are. Just the mammals who
happen to live on a certain little yellow sun in that little galaxy there on
the screen. We may have spread to a few other worlds, but that isn't the same
as saying we're masters of the universe, is it?"
Bernard
did not reply. He stared at the master screen in the control panel. A planet
hung large in the visual focus. The XV-ftl had
drifted into an orbit round it, an ever-narrowing orbit.
"We're landing,"
Bernard said.
98
THIRTEEN
The
planet of the Rosgollans was
not at all as Bernard had expected it to be. His idea of the home of a
super-race was a kind of super-Earth, with vaulting burnished towers springing
to the skies, meticulously planned parks providing contrast to the urban
scene, flexibridges linking buildings at heights dizzying to the eye. He was
wrong.
Perhaps
the Rosgollans had had such things once; in any event, they had long since
discarded the empty majesty of massive cities. The scene that lay before the
Earthmen, as they left the ship—which had floated down, feather-light, in
defiance of all laws of inertia and mass—was one of pastoral serenity.
Gentle
green hills rolled out to the horizon. Dotting the green here and there were
the pastel tones of small houses that seemed to sprout as organically from the
ground as the low, stubby trees. There was no sign of industry, none of
transportation.
"Just like
fairyland," Dominici said softly.
"Or like
Paradise," murmured Havig.
Bernard
said, "It's the post-technological phase of civilization, I'm sure.
Remember the withering-away of the state that the ancient Marxists were forever
trumpeting about? Well, this is it, I'm sure." He realized he was speaking
in a hushed whisper, as though this were a museum or a house of worship.
The
nine of them stood together not far from the ship, waiting for a Rosgollan to
put in an appearance. The air was sharp, with an alien tang to it, but it felt
good to the lungs. A coolish breeze blew in from the hills. The sun was high in
the sky, and looked redder, cooler than was the sun of Earth.
Just when they were beginning to grow
impatient, a Ros-gollan appeared, winking into view out of
nowhere between one instant and the
next.
"Teleportation,"
Bernard murmured. "Even better than a transmat; you don't need a mechanical rig."
It
was impossible to tell whether the Rosgollan was the same one that had come to
them aboard the ship. This was about of a size with that other, but its
features and body were partially concealed by the blur of light that attended
these people wherever they went.
"We
shall go to the others," said the Rosgollan in its soft unspeaking voice.
The
golden glow suddenly enswaddled them all; Bernard felt a moment of womblike
warmth, and then the light dropped away, and the ship vanished.
They
were inside one of the alien houses. The Rosgollan said, "Be comfortable.
The interrogation is about to begin."
"Interrogation?" Laurance asked. "What kind of interrogation? What are you
planning to do with us, anyway?"
"You
will come to
no harm, Commander
Laurance," was the soft reply.
Bernard
tugged at Laurance's arm. "Better just relax and take things as they
come," he whispered. "Arguing with these people won't do a bit of
good."
Despite
himself, he Smiled. Rising defiantly to tell the Rosgollans off
was something like an ancient Roman defying a fusion bomb by shouting at it, "Civis Romanus sum! Hands off! I am a Roman citizenl" The
bomb would pay little attention; neither, Bernard suspected, would
these Rosgollans. But he felt a fundamental surety that these beings^of light
would not be capable of bringing about any harm.
The Earthmen made themselves comfortable.
There was no furniture in the room, only soft red
cushions, on which they sat. Although the cushions were marvelously comfortable,
and seemed to invite reclining, Bernard and the others remained sitting
tensely upright.
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
there were three more Rosgollans in the room. Looking
from one to the next, Bernard could see no discernible
difference; they were as
100
identical as
though all had been stamped from the same mold.
"The
interrogation will now begin," came the serene word from one (or was it
all?) of them.
"Don't
answer a thing!" Laurance snapped suddenly. "We don't want to give
them any vital information. Remember, we're prisoners here, no matter how well
they happen to treat us!"
Despite
Laurance's outburst, the interrogation began. There was nothing Laurance could
do to prevent it. Not a word was spoken, not even in their peculiar mental voice;
but, beyond doubt, there was a flow of information. The Rosgollans were simply
drawing what they wanted to know, without troubling to ask.
The
interrogation seemed to last only an instant, though Bernard was not sure:
perhaps it took hours, but the hours were shrunken to a point in time. He could
not tell.-But he felt the outflow of information.
The
four Rosgollans drew everything from him: his childhood, his disastrous first
marriage, his academic career, his interests and crochets, his second marriage,
his unlamented divorce. All this they took from him in an instant, examined,
discarded as being personal and therefore of only incidental interest.
In
the next layer they drew from him the summons from the Technarch, the journey
to the Norglan colony, the unsatisfactory meeting with the Norglans, the
bungled voyage home.
Then
it was over. The tendril of thought the Rosgollans had inserted into the brains
of the Earthmen snapped back. Bernard blinked, stunned a little by the snapping
of the contact. He felt drained, hollow, exhausted. He felt as though his
brain had been drawn forth, examined very carefully, and put back into place.
And the Rosgollans were
laughing.
There
was no sound in the room, and, as ever, the faces of the strange beings were
veiled in impenetrable light. But the impression of
laughter hung in the air. Bernard felt his face grow red, without quite knowing
why he felt shame. There
101
had
been nothing in his mind of which he was ashamed. He had lived his life, sought
the ends he thought desirable, cheated no man, wronged
no one intentionally. But the Ros-gollans were laughing.
Laughing
at me, he wondered? Or at someone else here? Or at all of us, at all
the human race?
The
unheard laughter died away. The Rosgollans came close to each other; their
fields of light seemed to coalesce strangely.
"You're
laughing at us!" Laurance cried belligerently. "Laughing, you damned
superior beings!"
Bernard touched his arm again. "Laurance
..."
The
alien reply was gentle and perhaps a trifle self-reproachful. "Yes, we
are amused. We ask your forgiveness, Earthmen, but we are amused!"
Again
the laughter rang out silently. Bernard realized that these Rosgollans were not
quite the noble and mature beings he had been regarding them as. They could
laugh at the struggles of a younger race. It was a patronizing laugh. Bernard frowned hncertainly, trying to fit the laughter into the
culture-pattern he was constructing for the Rosgollans. Angels did not
patronize, he thought. And until this moment he had regarded them almost as
angelic, with their auras of light and their serenity of motion and their
seemingly boundless powers of mind. But angels would hot laugh at mortals that
way.
"We
will leave you alone a while," the Rosgollans said. The light vanished.
The earthmen turned to look at each other dazedly.
"So
that's what it's like to be interrogated," Dominici said. "I could
feel them prowling around in my head—and I couldn't shut them out. Imagine it—fingers stroking your bare
brain!" He shuddered at the memory.
"So
now we're pets," said Laurance bitterly. "I guess the Rosgollans will
come from all over the universe to play with us."
"Why
are they doing all this?" Hernandez demanded. "Why did they have to
drag us down here and toy with us?"
"More
important," said Dominici "How are we going to get out of here?"
"We aren't," said Bernard in a flat
voice. "Not unless the Rosgollans decide to let us go. We aren't exacdy
masters of 'our own fate."
"You're
turning into a defeatist, Bernard," Dominici said wamingly. "Ever
since the moment these things first grabbed hold of the ship, you've been
taking the blackest possible interpretation of everything."
"I'm
just looking at things realistically. There's nothing to be gained by deluding
ourselves. We're in a mess. How are we going to escape, Dominici? You answer
that. Where's the ship?"
"Why-uh . .
Dominici
paused. With a cold frown on his face, he walked to the door of the room. The
door obediently drew back as he approached, and he stepped out, into the open.
The others followed him through the obliging doorway and into the outdoors.
Green hills rolled to the
horizon in gentle undulations.
Fleecy clouds broke the
harsh metallic blueness of the sky.
.There was no sign of the ship.
None
at all.
Bernard
shrugged meaningfully. "You see, we might be anywhere on this planet. Anywhere at all. Five, ten, even fifteen
thousand miles from the ship. Am I being defeatist? How are we going to
get back? By transmat? Teleportation?
On foot? Which direction do we go? I'm not trying to
be pessimistic. I just don't think we've got any way of getting free."
"So
we're prisoners, then," Dominici said bitterly. "Prisoners of
these—these superbeingsl"
"Even
if we could reach the ship," said Havig, "they would only bring us
back, the same way they brought us here originally. Bernard's right. We are
totally at their mercy. "We cannot alter that."
"Why don't you
pray?" Stone asked.
Havig merely shrugged. "I have never
ceased praying. But I fear we have fallen into a situation which God has
designed for us, and from which He will not free us until His purpose is
attained."
Bernard
knelt in the meadow just outside the building. He 103 snatched up a stalk of
saw-edged grass with a snapping motion of his hand, taking a perverse pleasure
in the slight sting of the grass cutting into his skin.
It was a painful business, this being gently
wafted to Ros-golla. It struck at the center of a man's soul to take hold of
him this way, to render him completely helpless, to keep him in this sort of
smiling bondage.
Bernard clenched and unclenched his fists
angrily. He thought back across only a short span of time to the easy-living
dilettante whose self-centered life had been punctured by the Technarch's
call. Then 1 sat in my
vibrochair and lived my own quiet life. And now I am a representative of Earth
in who knows what macrocosmic judging?
"Hey!" Dominici
exclaimed. "Food!"
Bernard
turned. He caught a glimpse of a dying light, and, spread out on the grass in
front of the house, he saw trays of food. Hunger assailed him, and he realized
they were far from the ship, far from their own Earthman foods, with no
immediate likelihood of returning.
"We might as well dig in," he said.
"The worst it can do is kill us."
He
picked up a small golden cake and nibbled it experimentally. It literally
melted in his mouth, flowing down his gullet like honey. He ate another, then
turned his attention to blue gourd-like vegetables, to a crystal pitcher of
clear yellow wine, to round translucent white fruits the size of cherries. It
was all delicious, and it was impossible to suggest that such delicate foods
might be poisonous to a Terran metabolism. He ate his fill and wandered away,
stretching out on the grass.
The
sun was dropping in the heavens now. Near the horizon a small moon could be
seen, low in the late-aftemoon sky, visible as a tiny flat pearl against the
darkening blue. It was a scene of simple beauty, as the meal had been simple,
as the few Rosgollan buildings he had seen were simple. That simplicity alone
argued for the great antiquity of these people. They had gone past the cultural
stage of finding virtue in size and complexity, into the serene mature era of
clean lines and uncluttered horizones. Bernard wondered how numerous they
were. If they lived scattered as sparsely as the
104
view
indicated, there could not be many of them on this world—but perhaps there were
thousands of Rosgollan worlds strung like beads through space, each with its
few thousand
inhabitants.
He could find pleasure in such a life, he who
had enjoyed solitude and quiet, the peace of a fishing preserve on a young
colony, the privacy of his own flat in London, the silence of his study-retreat
in the Syrtis Major.
"What do they want
with us?" Hernandez was asking.
"We
amuse them," Laurance said. "Maybe they'll grow tired of us sooner or
later, and let us go."
"Let us go where?" Nakamura said
quizzically. "We are more than one hundred thousand light-years from home.
Or will the Rosgollans show us how to find our way back, when they let us
go?"
"If they let us go," Dominici corrected.
"They
won't keep us here long," Bernard said, breaking his long silence.
"Oh? How do you know?"
"Because
we don't fit into the scheme of things here," the sociologist replied.
"We're blotches on the landscape. The Rosgollans have their own tranquil
fives to lead. Why should they install a bunch of barbarians on their quiet
planet to stir things up? No, they'll let us go when they're through with us. I
hardly think that these people are the zookeeper type."
The
night was falling rapidly now. It was an old world, Bernard thought; an old
race, an old sun, short days and long nights.
Unfamiliar
stars began to poke through the twilight's gray haze. Later, when the sharp
darkness had replaced the vague twilight, it would be possible to see the
island universe in which Earth's sun was merely an indistinguishable dot of
fight.
Darkness
came on with a rush. The Earthmen once again entered the little building
provided for them; a warm glow of fight made it more cheery, and it seemed
proof against the chill growing outside.
"What do we do?" Dominici asked, of
nobody in particular. "Sack out and wait for morning?"
105
"Is
there anything else we can do?" Havig demanded. "We have no very
great choice of diversions.. We can sleep, and we can
pray, and we can think."
"Pray
for us, Havig," said Laurance quietly. "Talk to that God of yours,
get Him to arrange for our return trip home."
Bernard
said, "I don't think he can do that, Commander. Don't Neopuritans believe
that it's irreverent to ask for special favors?"
Havig
flashed one of his rare smiles. "You are both right and you are wrong,
friend Bernard. We feel it an impertinence to approach Him for worldly goods,
for luxuries, for power. This is not prayer; prayer is communication, understanding,
love. Not begging. But, on the other hand, to pray for
our welfare, our salvation—this is hardly irreverent. He wants us to ask for
whatever we think we need, but then to leave it up to Him and trust that when
His will is done, all will be well."
"But that's begging,
isn't it?" Bernard objected.
Havig
shrugged. "In His eyes, we are all supplicants in great need. I will
gladly pray for all of us, as I have been doing from the first."
"Right,
pray for us," Laurance said gruffly. "We need all the help we can
get."
Some
of the men settled themselves on the cushions as if settling down for the
night. Bernard walked to the edge of the single room, leaned against the wall,
and watched it turn transparent for three feet on either side of him to provide
him with a window.
He peered outward, upward. The strange stars
blazed down. He sought for Earth's galaxy, but it did not seem to be visible
from this part of the planet. Feeling suddenly stifled by the magnitude of his
distance from home, Bernard reeled away from the window and threw himself down on the nearest cushion. He jammed his eyes
tightly together. His lips moved as if of their own accord.
He recovered his self-control after an
instant and thought in quiet wonder, I prayed!
By the Hammer, I actually prayed to go home!
The prayer had been like a release. The knot
of tension
106
that had
been forming for hours within him let go its hold. He cradled his head on his
folded arms, kicked off his shoes, and was asleep within seconds.
FOURTEEN
Morning
came swiftly. Bernard woke
feeling cramped and musty from having slept fully dressed, and rose to a
sitting position. The others were strewn around the floor, still asleep, and
the room was still dark. But he was awake. He tiptoed to the wall, touched it
to make it transparent, and saw that the sun had risen. He glanced at his
watch. It was only little more than nine hours since the night had fallen, and
here the sun had risen again. Which meant that the
day, here on this world Rosgolla, was only about eighteen or nineteen hours
long.
Stepping
through the conveniently opening door, Bernard sucked in his breath sharply and
felt a quick stab of awe and delight. The air was marvelously fresh and sweet,
like young wine. The distant hills, smooth rounded humps, looked new-minted in
the transparent morning sky. A silvery sheen of dew glistened over the meadow.
For an instant Bernard almost forgot where he
was and how he had come to be here.
He
had dreamed of Katha. Now, in wakefulness, the lingering memory of the dream
surprised him, and made his mood a sadly introspective one. He rarely thought,
never dreamed, of the slim, bright-eyed, copper-haired girl who had been his
second wife. Yet last night he had dreamed of Katha.
He
thought he knew the reason why, too. The Rosgollan interrogation had stirred up
the old memories, and the long-hidden patterns would return to trouble him in
dreams until once again they settled, like particles suspended in water, to
their depth. He would suffer meanwhile. He had thought he
107
had
come to an accomodation with himself on the subject of Katha, but the dream had
disturbed him in a way he had thought was far behind.
"Morning,"
a voice said, behind him, startling him out of his reverie.
Bernard turned. "Morning," he said
to Dominici. "You surprised me." "Been up long?"
"Only
a little while, Dom. Ten minutes, maybe. I just walked out to have a
look-see." Bernard's eyebrows scooped into a frown; Dominici's sudden
blurt of sound had shattered the dream for good.
"You sleep well?"
Dominici wanted to know.-
"Middling." Bernard knelt and ran his hand over the cool dewy grass. "I was
bothered by dreams."
"Dreams? That's funny. So was I." Dominici laughed quietly. "I dreamed
I was honeymooning again. Took me back fifteen, eighteen
years. The two of us in a watercar, skimming over the
waves. My arm around her waist. Her hair billowing out in the breeze. And casting a line,
pulling a big thing with teeth out, Jan afraid of it and asking me to throw it
back into the water . . ." Dominici paused. "I used to wake up
drenched with sweat when I dreamed about Jan. Not now, though. I suppose I'm
starting to forget. She was killed in a transmat discontinuity," he added
after a brief pause.
"Oh.
I'm sorry." Bernard flinched at the image of a young woman smiling
goodbye, stepping into the radiant transmat field, then
vanishing forever into the void in a one-in-a-triUion accident. The transmat
was not perfect; yet this was the first time Bernard had ever spoken to someone
directly involved in any sort of transmat accident.
"If
you have to die," Dominici said, "I suppose that's the best way of
any. You don't feel a thing, not even for a quarter of a second. One minute
you're alive, the next you don't exist. I didn't have a funeral for her. I kept
hoping she'd turn up, you know.'There was always that element of doubt. But the
transmat people said no, there definitely had been a slipup in the coordinates,
she was gone forever. They gave me two hundred thousand in damages. And you
know something? When I held that check in my hands I broke down and cried
108
for the
first time since it had happened. Because then I believed it."
"What a terrible thing
to happen," Bernard muttered.
"We
were going on vacation," Dominici said quietly. "Everything was packed, I was standing there with the suitcases in my hands.
She kissed me, stepped through . . ."
"Don't go on. You're
hurting yourself."
"I
don't mind," Dominici said. "Some of the pain is dying down now.
After ten years. Look, I'm not shaking. I'm talking about her, and I'm not
shaking. That's a step. I'm just slow to get over it, that's all."
They
talked on for a while, as the others of the group began one by one to awaken
within. It occurred to Bernard that he liked Dominici more than any of his
other fellow wayfarers; Havig, though not the stereotyped fanatic Bernard had
originally pictured him as, was far too austere and unbending to make a close
friend, while Stone, for all his superficial diplomatic guile, was much too
open and simple a person. But Dominici had an agreeable complexity, this
vitriolic little man who blasphemed irreverently at'Havig and yet, in times of
genuine stress, bowed himself to utter a Latin prayer and make the sign of the
Cross.
One
at a time, now, the others were coming out, stretching their legs after the
short night. Stone joined them first, then Nakamura
with his cheery greeting, then Havig, nodding brusquely in that
neither-friendly-nor-hostile way of his, and then Laurance, lost in his own
private bitterness. After him came Clive and Hernandez, with the taciturn
Peterszoon strolling out last and glaring at the group in general as though
each one, personally, bore the direct responsibility for his current
predicament.
"What are we supposed to be doing?"
Clive asked. "We just stand here and wait, eh?"
"Maybe
they'll feed us," Stone said. "I'm starved. Is there any sign of
breakfast?"
"Not
yet," answered Bernard. "Maybe they were just waiting until we were
all awake."
"Or maybe they won't feed us at
all," Dominici suggested. "We're just a pack of filthy lower beings,
after all. And if they decide..."
"Look there!" Hernandez sang out
suddenly. "Ill be damned! Look!"
Every head turned as one to look in the
direction of Hernandez' tautly pointing arm.
"No,"
Bernard gasped in flat disbelief, fit just isn't so. It's a hoax—an illusion .
. ."
For
an instant, a nintbus of radiance had settled lightly to the meadow some fifty
yards from the group of Earthmen, having drifted down from far above. The light
had glimmered briefly, then flickered out.
And in the glowing afterimage of the light,
two burly figures could be seen—two massive dark-skinned figures, not precisely
human, that staggered uncertainly over the moist grass,
looking about them in bewilderment and—perhaps— fear.
Skrinri
and Vortakel.
The kharvish.
The
haughty Norglan diplomats.
"We
have brought you companions," said a Rosgollan voice of invisible source.
"The negotiations may now proceed once more."
The
big Norglans looked as though they were drunk, or else just badly
disorientated. They came to a halt, though, seemingly collecting their wits,
and made a swift recovery from their attack of the blind staggers. Then all
their recovery went for nought as they recoiled in astonishment upon catching
sight of the Earthmen.
"Are
they the same ones as—as we talked to before?" Dominici
asked.
"I'm
sure of it," Bernard said. "Take a look. See, the bigger one is Skrinri, the one with the scar on his shoulder is
Vortakel."
It
was so hard to tell alien beings one from another, Bernard thought. Their very
alienness served to draw the attention away from any minor differences of
appearance that would aid in distinguishing them. But unmistakably these were
the two Norglans who had come as kharvish to
the Earthmen.
The
Norglans drew near, seemingly making an attempt to master their total
bewilderment. In a tone that was harsh, guttural, quite unlike his mellow and confident boom of old, Skrinri
said, "You—Earthmen? The same Earthmen?"
Stone
was supposed to be the spokesman of the Terran group. But Stone was gaping in
dumbstruck wonderment. After an instant of cold silence Bernard called out,
"Yes. We have met before with you. You are Skrinri—and you, you are
Vortakel."
"We
are." It was Skrinri who still answered. "But—why have you come here
. . .?"
"We
were taken here, not of our own will." Bernard illustrated the process by
graphically snatching up a blade of grass. "Our ship was captured and
taken here. But what of you?"
Skrinri,
apparently still overwhelmed by the enormity of what had been done to him, did
not reply. It was Vortakel who spoke, in an unsteady
voice. "There was—there was light all around. And a voice said, Come, and the world was not there any more. And—and we are now here . .
." He stopped, as though abashed at his admission of the ease with which
they had been yanked across the universe.
It
was discomforting, and yet in a way strangely satisfying and pleasant, to see
how completely shaken the two Norglan emissaries were. Not surprisingly,
Skrinri and Vortakel seemed thoroughly demolished by the abrupt discovery that
they did not represent the pinnacle of evolution in the universe after all
"Where are we?"
Skrinri asked.
"Far
from home," Bernard said. He groped for the words he wanted; how was it
possible to explain in communicable terms the concepts "galaxy,"
"parsec," "universe"? He abandoned the effort. "We
are—so far from home," he said after a moment's thought, "that
neither your sun nor ours can be seen in the sky."
The
Norglans looked at each other in a way that seemed to connote simultaneous
suspicion and distress. The two aliens spoke with each other for a long while,
in their own consonant-studded, vastly involuted language. The Earthmen stood
by, listening without comprehension, as Skrinri and Vortakel discussed the
situation.
Bernard
pitied them. If anything, the Norglans had a 111 higher opinion of themselves and their relation to the universe at
large than any of the Earthmen had; and it had been crushing enough to the
Terran ego to discover that such a race as the Rosgollans existed. How much
more agonizing i|t must be, he
wondered, for the Norglans to discover that they could be plucked from their
planet and hurled incalculable distances across the sky by strange glowing
beings of another galaxy?
He
became aware that Rosgollans were returning. Like fireflies they glimmered on
the horizon, flickering into existence all about. Two, three, fifty, a hundred: soon the meadow was ringed with the radiant
creatures, will-o'-the-wisps floating above the dew-flecked ground.
A
silent Rosgollan voice said, "We have interrogated the Norglans while they
journeyed here. We learn from them that they hold it is their manifest destiny
to conquer all the universe, while you Earthmen have
something of the same belief. Obviously, one side or the other must give ground
or there can be no peace between you, and war will sunder your planets."
Skrinri
growled—evidently the Rosgollan's words had been intelligible to the Norglans
as well as the Earthmen— "We have been fair to the Terrans. We permit them
to keep their own worlds. But the other planets—these must be ours."
"By
whose grant?" asked the Rosgollan with a trace of mockery in the bland voice. "At whose behest do you take possession of all
the worlds there are?"
"At
our own!" rumbled the Norglan, getting some of his self-confidence back.
"The worlds are there; we reach them; we take them. What greater authority
do we need than our own strength?"
"None," replied the Rosgollan.
"But your own strength is insufficient. Weak, arrogant, blustering
creatures you are, nothing more. I speak now to both participants in this dispute."
Skrinri
and Vortakel seemed to curdle with rage. "We do not speak morel Return us
to our world or we shall take steps! Imperial Norgla does not tolerate this
manner of abuse. We ..."
Vortakel's voice died away in sudden
confusion. He and 112
Skrinri
had risen from the ground during their outburst; now they hovered, better than a
yard above the grasstops, kicking their feet in rage and frustration.
Involuntarily, several of the Earthmen laughed—but the laughter died away,
quickly, guiltily. Bernard felt a twinge of shame at his laugher. Two
intelligent creatures were being humiliated before their eyes; proud spirits
were being broken. Ludicrous though the scene might be, no Earthman had a right
to laugh. We may
be dangling next, for
all we know, Bernard thought somberly as he watched the outraged Norglans
writhe. "Put us down!" Skrinri howled.
"Come,
show us your strength now, men of Imperial Nor-gla," came
the dry, mocking murmur of the Rosgollan spokesman. Calmly, they put into
words their challenge. "You do not tolerate levitation, Norglans? Very well, then. Force us to stop."
Double-elbowed
purple arms flailed the air madly. The Norglans rose, inch by
inexorable inch, while the Earthmen kept stony silence. Now Skrinri and
Vortakel were more than their own heights above the ground, and looking down in
dismay and anger.
"Put—us—down!" Skrinri grunted.
"Very
well."
"You—ummpM The Norglans dropped suddenly, much to their own great surprise. They
landed in an undignified heap and remained on the ground a moment, hugging it,
as though wanting to be absolutely certain they were no longer under the
control of the Rosgollans' powers. When the two Norglans rose, it was slowly,
with bowed heads, and they did not look at the Earthmen.
There was an instant of silence.
Then
the Rosgollans said, "We have taken you from your home world, and we have
shown you the true extent of your strength. Answer us now, men of Imperial
Norgla. And still you claim the universe
is yours?"
The Norglans made no reply.
The
Rosgollan voice continued, quiet but rolling with monumental majesty all the
same, "And there stand the Earthmen, creatures less sure of themselves
than these Norglans, but equally proud, equally greedy. You, Earthmen: you would divide the universe with the men
of Norgla, we iearn. But does it lie in your hands to make such an apportionment,
Earthmen?"
For
a long moment none of the little bank of Terrans dared speak. It was futile to
trumpet slogans of strength, in the teeth of beings who
held powers beyond comprehension. Shaking a fist at a whirlwind is more a
demonstration of weakness than of strength.
But something had to be
said.
Some justification had to
be made.
I am
not the spokesman, Martin
Bernard thought. I
have no need to speak out. Why should I not keep silence?
But
silence, he saw, would be intolerable, and if no one else spoke forth he would
have to do so. Someone had to speak in defense of Earth and Earth's
pretensions, at what was rapidly taking on many of the aspects of a trial by
jury.
Bernard
moved forward self-consciously, standing between his group and the Norglans and
looking off at where he thought the Rosgollan spokesman stood.
"We
acted in no sense of pride," Bernard said quietly. "Our actions stem
from motives that do not need apology. We are a growing race; we sought room to
expand. The Norglans, like us, must have more room. Our hope was to, reach an agreement that would prevent a conflict of
interests and thus a destructive war."
"You
laid claim to'half the universe," the Rosgollan voice said accusingly.
"Where is the humility in this? Where the
self-restraint?"
Bernard held his ground, sensing the silent
encouragement of his fellow Earthmen. "We laid claim to half the universe,
yes," he said. "We did so thinking that the universe held no people
but Terran and Norglan. There
lay our pride, in that
blind assumption. We were wrong, tragically wrong. There are other races in the
universe, we now know, and of all the races we are the youngest, and therefore
the most foolish, and for this rashness of youth we ask indulgence. But we
still claim the right to expand. We still claim the right to colonize worlds
which now lie empty."
He
thought he had scored a point. But then he felt waves of ironic laughter
sweeping down from the circling jury of
114
Rosgollans. Color mounted to his face, and he realized that what he had hoped was a
ringing declaration had turned into a whining plea.
"The
Earthmen reduce their claim," commented the Rosgollan voice sardonically.
"Instead of half the universe, now they simply demand half of the
uninhabited worlds. It is a major concession, we must suppose. It shows
commendable willingness to be flexible. What of you proud men of Imperial
Norgla? Speak for your people, give us your answer. Will you, too, reduce your
claim?"
The
Norglans did not hurry to reply. They had adjusted to the strangeness of their
situation by this time, and they conferred for a long time before Vortakel said
slowly, "You have shown us that—perhaps—we are not—not yet—the strongest
people of the universe. We cannot fight you. Therefore we yield."
"Well,
now, Bernard thought. I'd say that was pretty noble of you, old
boy. He grinned. You're willing to make the grudging admission
that you're licked. I'll bet it must have hurt!
For
a long frozen moment after the Norglan declaration no one moved, no one reacted
visibly. The slump-shouldered Norglans remained standing at each other's side
like a pair of beleaguered Vikings making a last stand, while the Earthmen
huddled in their little group some twenty feet away, and the ringing circle of
Rosgollans remained around them, more sensed than seen.
Then the stasis broke.
"Just one
moment!"
Laurance cried suddenly. "Yes? A point of order?"
"You
might call it that," the spaceman said tightly, stepping forward to take
the space Bernard had held. Looking up defiantly, Laurance said, "You've
brought us all to this place, somehow, these Norglans and us. It wasn't much of
a trick for you to grab us and yank us here. And now you're holding a little
kangaroo court here. Well, fine. You have some fancy powers that we don't
pretend to have, and you've shown them off beautifully. You can knock
spaceships off course, walk through walls, hoist
people across space in a flash. But now tell me this: what right do you have to
come meddling
115
inside our galaxy? Who set you up as our judge in
the first place, anyway? Answer me thatl Is it just
the right of might that lets you push us around?"
"We
are not judging you here," replied the Rosgollan voice levelly. "We
are merely mediating a dispute between two races. Two young races, be it understood. In order to mediate successfully, we must
establish our authority, we must demonstrate our strength. It is the only way
to deal with children," the Rosgollan said.
"With . . ."
"Children, yes. Life has come late to your galaxy. As yet,
only two intelligent races have evolved there—energetic, vigorous races. For
the first time the paths of these young races have crossed. Your fledgling
empires soon would be at war-without our mediation.,
We take it upon ourselves, therefore-acting in the interest of the races of the
universe, of which we are neither the oldest nor the most powerful—to prevent
this war.
"Therefore limits will be drawn for the
empire of Earth, and limits for the empire of Norgla. You shall not exceed
these bounds in your search for colonies. And in this way your galaxy shall
live in peace, forever and to all eternity, world without end."
FIFTEEN
It
was done. And, though the
Archonate knew nothing of the treaty, every one of the nine Earthmen realized
that what they had done was irrevocable.
Through
some magic of their own, the Rosgollans had conjured up, out there in the
meadow, a scale model of the island universe that contained Earth and Norgla.
It drifted in midair, a spiral with two curving snakelike arms, composed of millions
and millions of glowing points of fight. The modeL breathtaking in its white
loveliness, looked authentic as it
116
hung there,
a flattened lens ten feet long, shining with a cold brilliance.
Suddenly,
springing up within the galactic model, a line of green light picked out a
sphere perhaps a foot in diameter, a glowing vacuole within the protozoan-shape that was the galactic model.
"This
is the Terran sphere of dominion," a Rosgollan voice silently informed.
An
instant later a second sphere sprang into glowing life, this one red, of
virtually the same size, and located halfway across the model.
"This
is the Norglan sphere of dominion," came the Rosgollan
admonition.
Earthmen
and Norglans stared at the model, and at the two puny stellar empires ringed
out within it. They waited, knowing what was to come.
A
searingly bright line of fierce violet zigzagged out across the model, dividing
it from rim to core, lancing between the tight-packed stars to partition the
galaxy into two roughly equal segments. The model looked now like a microorganism in the first stages of fission; the violent blaze of the
violet boundary assailed all eyes. Bernard looked away; he saw the others doing
the same.
Colors
began to spread all across the model, the green light filling all the Terran half, the red streaming over all the Norglan
suns. The Rosgollan said, "These shall be the everlasting boundaries of
your dominions. Crossing them for any reason will bring immediate retribution
from beyond your galaxy. You each are absolute masters within your own sectors,
but there must be no trespassing."
"We—we have no right to enter into a binding agreement without informing our government of the course .of
action," Stone protested stammeringly. "We quite frankly lack the
power to . . ."
"The arrangements
concluded here will be binding," replied the Rosgollan. "Let us not obscure
the facts. Formal consent of high officials will not be necessary in this
matter. This is not a treaty being arrived at by mutual negotiation; it is an
imposition from without. The situation is clear. You will obey
117
the
establishment of the boundary line. No alternative is open to you."
There
it was in the open, Bernard thought. Treaties are made between powers of equal
sovereignty. This was something different, a blunt command.
The
Norglans, not very surprisingly, looked agitated by the open statement of
intent. Skrinri declared, "You—order us
to obey your decision . . .?"
"Yes.
We order you. These are the boundaries. You will keep within them; and you will
cease to threaten each other with war. We command this in the name of galactic
harmony, and we will not tolerate deviation. Is that understood?"
Eleven
figures stared dumbly at the model and at the eerie creatures that had created
it. No one spoke, neither Earthman nor Norglan. Several seconds ticked by in
silence, without a reply.
"Is
that understood?" demanded
the Rosgollan again, with some acerbity.
Someone
had to speak, to admit what everyone already privately accepted as the dictates
of necessity. Martin Bernard shrugged and said quiedy, "Yes. We
understand the situation."
"And
the men of Norgla?"
"We understand," Skrinri said,
echoing not only Bernard's words but his tone of resignation. "It is done,
then." The divided model winked out.
"You
will be returned to your home planets. There you will inform the heads of your
governments of the existence of the boundary lines we have just created. You
will warn your governments that any transgression of these boundaries will lead
to instant punishment."
It was done.
Irrevocably?
Unarguably?
Light
swirled blindingly around the stolid, heavy figures of the Norglan negotiators,
and immediately they hazed over and were gone. An instant later, most of the
Rosgollans had been translated elsewhere the same way.
And a fraction of a second after that, the
Earthmen felt a
swathe of warm light engulf them—and, without any sensation of transition,
they found themselves once again standing just outside their ship.
Out
of the silence came a Rosgollan voice "in gentle command.
"Enter
your ship," it ordered quietly. "We will restore you to the galaxy in
which you belong."
Bernard
lifted his eyes momentarily, caught those of Laurance. The Commander looked
baffled, blocked, humiliated. Laurance glanced away. Bernard did not look at
anyone else. The entire group of Earthmen, silent, shamefaced, clambered one by
one into the waiting ship.
Peterszoon,
the last man to come aboard, activated the hatch controls, swinging the entry
gate shut and dogging it tightly in place. There was the faint hiss as the
pressure equalizers purred into action. Laurance and his crewmen filed through
the ship to their quarters up front in the nose. Bernard, Havig, Stone, and
Dominici went wearily aft, to the passenger cabin.
No one spoke.
The
four men in the rear cabin took blastoff places and waited uncertainly, each
averting his eyes from those of the man opposite him. The common feeling of
depression, of supreme humiliation, dampened spirits.
The
ship lifted almost immediately, without the slightest sensation of having
blasted off. The vessel simply was detached from the ground and floated
spaceward, as though escape velocity on Rosgolla were zero, and mass and
inertia just so many meaningless words.
It was Stone who finally broke the clammy
silence as the ship sprang upward.
"So that's that," he muttered
bitterly, staring at the wall. "We've got quite a story to tell when we
get homel I'll really make a splash. The bold Earthmen encounter not one alien
race but two,
and the second one kicked
us around a little harder than the other. But we sure came off third best in
that little conference!"
Dominici shook his head in disagreement.
"I wouldn't say we did so badly."
"No?" Stone
challenged.
"Not at all," Dominici maintained.
"I'd say the Norglans came out a good sight poorer off than we did, after
all was said and done. Don't forget that originally the Norglans were claiming
the entire universe except for our little sphere, before the Rosgallans
stepped in. And now the blueskins are held down to a mere fifty-fifty split of
one galaxy, nothing more!"
"I suppose you could
call that a victory
for us," Stone
said.
"But that kind of reasoning can rationalize away anything."
"And it's assuming that the Norglans
will abide by the dividing line," Havig remarked.
"I think they will," Bernard said.
"It doesn't seem to me that they have much of an alternative. They'll have to stick to the agreement, whether they like it or not. These Rosgollans
seem to have almost unlimited mental powers. They'll probably be keeping an
eye cocked at our galaxy, policing it and breaking up any trouble that might
conceivably start over a boundary violation."
"Policing
our galaxy," Stone said darkly. "That's lovely, isn't it? So we set
out from Earth with a flourish of trumpets, as representatives of the
universe's dominant race, and we come back home policed into one little corner
of our own galaxy. That isn't going to be easy for the Archonate to
swallow."
"It won't be easy for anyone to
swallow," Bernard said. "But the truth never is. And this is one bit
of truth that's bound to stick in any Earthman's craw. The thing we've found
out we didn't know before is that we aren't the
universe's dominant race; at least not yet, anyway. The Rosgollans and maybe
some others out in the distant galaxies have an evolutionary start of perhaps
five or six hundred thousand years on us. So we've been slapped back into our
place—for a while. We were like a bunch of kids imagining that the universe
was ours for grabs. Well, it isn't, that's all, and the Archonate and all the
rest of the people of Earth will just have to get used to the idea."
"Regardless,
this is the greatest defeat Earth has suffered in her history," Stone persisted.
"Defeat?" Bernard snorted. "Listen, Stone, do you
call it a
120
humiliating defeat if you slam your hand against a metal bulkhead and break your
fingers? Sure, the bulkhead defeated your hand. It'll do it every time. It's
in the fundamental nature of metal bulkheads to be stronger than bare fingers,
and it's ridiculous to moan about the philosophical aspects of the
situation."
"If
I want to defeat a bulkhead, I don't use my bare hands," Stone replied.
"I'd use a blowtorch. And I'd win ten times out of ten."
"But
we don't have
a blowtorch we can use on
the Rosgollans," Bernard said. "We just aren't in their league. It's
in the nature of highly advanced races half a million years older than we are
to be more powerful than we are. Why get upset about it?"
"Bernard
is right," Havig said in a quiet voice. "The great wheel of life
keeps turning. Some day the Rosgollans will be gone from the universe, and we,
in the twilight of our days, will watch other, younger, stronger races come
brawling across the skies. And what will we do then? Just what the Rosgollans
did to us: confine these races, for the sake of our own peace. But, perhaps, by
then we will know Who has made us, and we will not act
for our own sake."
Sinking
his head in his hands, Stone muttered, "What Bernard's been saying all
makes perfectly good sense on the abstract, intellectual level. I'm not trying
to deny that. But come down to the realities of the situation. How do you go
about telling a planet that thought it was the summit of creation that it's
very small potatoes indeed?"
"That's going to be the Archonate's
problem, not ours," Dominici said.
"What does it matter whose problem it is?" Stone demanded sharply. "This will set Earth
in an uproar. It's a planetary humiliation."
"It's a planetary eye-opening,"
Bernard snapped. "It'll destroy any lingering shred of complacency. For
the first time we have some other races to measure ourselves against. We know
that the Norglans are just about as good as we are, right now—and that the
Rosgollans are a whole lot better. So we know we'll have to progress, to keep
abreast of the Nor-
121
glans, to
aim toward the level of the Rosgollans. And we'll get there."
Hernandez entered the cabin and stopped,
looking about uncertainly at everyone.
"Am I interrupting something
important?" he asked.
"What
could be important now,
anyway?" Stone asked
in a dismal voice.
"We
were just hashing over the implications of our new status," Bernard
explained. "Is there any sort of trouble up front, Hernandez?"
The crewman shook his head. "No, no
trouble, Dr. Bernard. Commander Laurance sent me back to let you know that it
seems the Rosgollans have returned us to the place where we got lost, and we're
about to convert into no-space and head for home."
"But that can't be," Stone said.
Simultaneously
Dominici gasped and said, "What? You mean we're back in our own galaxy so
fast? But. . ."
"That's
right," Hernandez said quietly. "It's only half an hour or so since
we left Rosgolla, ship time. But we've come back."
"Are you certain?" Bernard asked.
"The Commander's positive."
Hernandez turned and left. A tremor of cold
awe shot through Bernard.
The
ship, then, had crossed the galactic gulf in a mere matter of twenty or thirty
minutes, thanks to the boost from the Rosgollans. It was a feat beyond the
capacity of the human mind to grasp.
Beyond the capacity of the human mind. But, Bernard realized, it might have been
the simplest thing in the world for a race as advanced as the Rosgollans. An after-dinner stunt, a casual flip of a craft across thousands of
light-years— hardly worth mentioning.
He felt profoundly uneasy.
Yet,
even so, there was comfort. The Rosgollans were half a million years ahead,
evolutionally. And they could work miracles. But how many accomplishments of man would seem like miracles to the man of only a few hundred years earlier?
Not to mention man of half a million years.
122
Where were we half a million years ago? Bernard wondered. We were pounding our' hairy chests, brachiating
gaily through the trees, cooking our uncles for dinner, maybe even eating them
raw if cooking hadn't been invented
yet.
And
yet we came all the way from Pithecanthropus erectus to the transmat era in
half a million years—picking up speed as we came. That's a hell of a long
journey in not really a hell of a
long time. So who's to say where we'll be half a million years from now? Who
can predict where we'll be when we're as old as the Rosgollans are now?
It
was a warm, comforting kind of thought. For the first time since the long
journey had begun, back in the hopeless wastes of Central Australia, Bernard
felt a moment of certainty, of understanding man's relation to the universe.
The new warmth flooded dizzyingly
over him.
"Hey, Bernard. Bernard? Are you feeling all right?" Dominici asked.
"Uh—yes. Sure. Why do you ask?"
"You
looked so queer all of a sudden. You got a kind of funny smile on your face for
a second, a smile that I've never seen on you before."
"I
was—thinking about something," he said quietly. "Some pieces fitted
together. And I—well, I just felt good for
a second. I still do." He leaned forward. "Dom, tell me about the
Norglans, biologically speaking. As much as you could figure
out."
Dominici
frowned. "Well—for one thing, they're obviously mammals."
"Of course. How about their
evolutionary decent?"
"They
stem from some primate-like creature, I'm pretty certain. Of course, there are
big differences, but that's only to be expected across a gulf of twelve or
fifteen thousand light-years. The eyes, the double elbow—these are things we
don't have. But other than that, at least on external evidence alone, I'd say
they were pretty much like us."
"A younger race than we are, would you say?" Bernard
went on.
Uncertainty hooded Dominici's eyes.
"Younger? No, I wouldn't say that. I'd be inclined to say they were an older race than
we are."
"Why do you say
that?"
Dominici
shrugged. "Call it a hunch. They seem settled in their ways, stratified
almost. The difference couldn't be much—two or three thousand years, maybe—but
I have a
definite feeling they've
been civilized longer than we have."
"I
tend to agree," Havig said from his corner of the cabin. "From what
little I could catch of that complicated language of theirs, I'd say it's a
highly evolved one—the sort of language a race might have been speaking for a
couple of thousand years. But what's on your mind, Bernard? Why
the Sudden questions?"
Bernard
shrugged. "I'm piecing together something to tell the Technarch when we
get back," he said flatly, and made no other attempt at an explanation.
The
gong sounded, signalling conversion. Conversion came; not long after, Nakamura
came aft to let the passengers know that this time the ship was square on
course, and that a meal was about to be served.
They
ate quietly. There was no reason to be jubilant after such a mission to the
stars. They were all conscious that they were returning to Earth after a
mission that had ended in unexpected diminution of man's place in the
universe. The news they bore would hardly be welcome to the people of the Terran
worlds or to that hard, inflexibly proud man who had impelled them to take this
journey. Harsh truths are rarely welcomed.
Havig
remained in the galley to give Nakamura a hand
with the job of clearing away the meal. Bernard returned to the cabin with
Stone and Dominici. A hush had fallen over them once again. Eaclrminute, now,
brought them closer to Earth, to the reckoning with the Technarch.
Stone
sat quietly on his bunk, his hands covering his face. Bernard looked up
suddenly and realized that the pudgy diplomat was weeping.
He went over to him.
"Stone. Snap out of it!"
"Leave me alone!"
was the mufHed reply.
"Come on, knock it off . .."
"Go away."
"Dammit,"
Bernard said hoarsely, "what are you crying 124 about, anyway? Does the fact that Earthmen aren't the big cheeses we
used to think we were upset you so damned much? Or is it the fact that you're
probably out of a job in the Archonate that's digging into you?"
Stone
looked up, white-faced, red-eyed, with the shocked look of a man whose most
carefully hidden secret has been punctured. "How dare you say that..."
"It's the truth, isn't
it?"
"What are you trying
to . .
"Admit it," Bernard said in a deliberately harsh voice. "Face
the truth. It's a habit we all could stand to cultivate around here."
The diplomat looked as though he's been given
five strokes with a neural whip. He shrank into himself and after a moment's
silence said in a soft, distant voice, "All right, it's the truth. I won't
try to hide it any more. For twenty-five years I've been training for the
Archonate, and it's all shot to hell now. I've got no career left. I'm nothing
but a used-up shell. Am I supposed to be happy about the way things have turned
out? Do you think they would ever pick as Archon the very man who brought back
the crushing news that we— that we . . ."
Stone could not go on.
He
started to blubber again. Bernard felt uncomfortable and helpless, as he stood
there watching the fleshy shoulders shake uncontrollably.
J might as well let him cry, Bernard thought. Maybe his career's
finished and maybe it isn't, but he can use the nervous release anyway. God
knows, we all can.
Bernard returned to his
bunk. After a while he saw Stone rise, wash his face, dry his eyes, and jab his
arm with a spraytube of a sedative. The diplomat lay down again and was asleep
almost at once. Bernard remained awake, watching the grayness of the vision
screen, watching the steadily advancing hands of the clock. His mood was a
depressed one, yet not as bleak as it might have been. It had been, he knew, a
valuable voyage—for him, for everyone on Earth. Earth had learned some things
about itself that it desperately had needed to find out—and so had Martin
Bernard. Some of his
125
actions
surprised him, as he looked back. His burst of sympathy and
understanding for Havig, for instance.
The
trip had broadened him, had extended his knowledge of himself and of others. He
could look back now and see the Martin Bernard of the recent past in a cold,
clear new perspective.
What he saw hardly pleased him.
He
saw a self-centered, almost irritatingly selfish man, with a streak of cruelty well camouflaged by his outward amiable ways. His
hatchet job on Havig's article, for instance, had not been an expression of
scholarly dissent as much as it had been an attack on a philosophy of life that
called his own hedonistic ways into question. His relationship with his wife, too, he saw with uncomfortable clarity: it
was not that he was not "bom" to be a good husband, but simply that
he had not been willing to work at it. She was no shrew, merely a woman who
wanted to share her husband's inner life and had been shut completely away from
it.
Bernard
stared steadily ahead. This close confinement, away from the lulling influences
of his cozy nest at home, had forced him in on himself, compelled him to take a
healing look at the real self enclosed in a shell of complacency.
Earth
was in for the same kind of rough awakening, Bernard thought. He wondered if
the people in general would profit from the jolt of truth, as he felt he had,
or if they would angrily throw up defense mechanisms to keep the true barb from
sinking in. Bernard frowned. He had his doubts.
And
time was running out, now. Only twelve hours remained until conversion time.
The clock hands moved, slowly, inexorably.
Ten hours.
Eight.
Six.
Four.
Twenty minutes.
The last minutes took the longest. Bernard's
face was set in a rigid mask, his eyeballs throbbing as he
watched the clock. No one had spoken in hours.
The
gongs sounded, finally, their resonance booming 126 through the cabin like an annunciation of
Judgment. The moment of conversion came. The vision screen brightened as the
faster-than-light ship twisted out of the unknown void and crashed across the
barrier into the familiar universe.
The
message came aft from Laurance, in slow, measured tones. "We're crossing
the orbit of Neptune at this moment, heading inward. I've radioed ahead to
Earth and they got the message.' They know we're coming home."
SIXTEEN
The
private chamber
of the Technarch McKenzie had a harsh, almost hieractic simplicity, with its
black stone walls and its bright, shimmering marble floor. The windowless
chamber had been designed to impress both its occupant and his visitors with
the somber importance of the Technarch's responsibilities—and in that it
succeeded, Martin Bernard thought. He felt a tinge of something quite like awe
as he followed McKenzie in.
Few
words had been interchanged since the landing of the XV-ftl in Central Australia an hour before. The wanderers had come forth; and
perhaps the Technarch had seen from their tense, bleak faces that the news they
bore was not to be blurted out hastily. In any event, he had asked no
questions, merely nodded a Technarchical greeting as the men left the ship.
Bernard had come up to him.
"Hearkening,
Excellency."
"Hello, Bernard. What
news?"
"Might
I report to Your Excellency in your private chambers?"
The
audience had been granted. One by one, stepping through the transmat, they had
crossed the gap from the spacefield to the Archonate Center. Now Dominici,
Stone, and Havig waited in the Technarch's antechamber, while Bernard, alone,
faced McKenzie within,
127
The Technarch slipped into his seat behind
his broad, bare-topped desk and gestured to Bernard to sit facing him. Glad to
get off his shaky legs, Bernard took the seat. He knew what he was going to
say, but tension gripped him all the same.
He
stared levelly at the Technarch's face. At the dark, brooding
eyes, the thick hump of a nose, the wide, tightly clamped lips, the jutting
chin, the corded neck. McKenzie seemed to have the strength of a bull. Bernard
wondered how much of that strength McKenzie was going to need in order to
withstand the blow that was coming.
"You
wish to report to me, Dr. Bernard. Very well. I'm
extremely interested in learning how your voyage went—in detail." The
Technarch's voice was level, well modulated, with the sharp edge of strength
shaping every syllable.
Bernard
said, "I'll begin at the beginning, then, Excellency."
"An
excellent idea."
Quit
stalling! Bernard told himself sharply. The Technarch's eyes reflected
impatience, mockery perhaps. In a calm voice Bernard said, "We had no
technical difficulties in reaching the planet of the alien colony. We landed,
observed the aliens for a while, and finally made ourselves known to them. Dr.
Havig did an excellent job of teaching several of the aliens to speak Terran.
They call themselves Norglans, by the way. We made it clear to them that we had
come to negotiate a treaty, whereupon our Norglan contact left us and returned,
some time later, with two of his superiors-larger physically and evidently much
more intelligent, since they were able to absorb a week's instruction in Terran
in only a few hours, from their comrade. When they met with us, they could
speak fairly well, and they improved every minute."
"What did they say?" McKenzie
asked.
Bernard leaned forward, knotting his hands
together tensely. "We explained quite clearly to them that it was
inevitable that the boundaries of our respective spheres of expansion were
bound to overlap and clash, and we showed them that it was Earth's wish to
arrive at a peaceful settle-
128
ment now, rather
than let matters slide until the actual collision came, and with it war."
"Yes? And how did they react?"
"Badly. They listened to what we had to say, and then they presented a
counter-proposal: that Earth confine itself to the worlds already colonized,
leaving all the rest for Nor-gla."
"What?" Fury blazed in the Technarch's eyes. "Of
all the preposterous nonsensel You mean they simply
told you to agree to an end of all Terran expansion? That we abdicate as a
galactic power?"
Bernard nodded. "That was precisely the
way they put it. The galaxy was theirs; we would be allowed to keep the worlds
we had already taken, but no more."
"And you rejected this
insanity, of course."
"We didn't get the
chance to."
"What?"
"The
two Norglan ambassadors hurled their ultimatum and walked out—went back to
their home planet. Evidently they have the equivalent of transmat travel
between worlds of their system too, Excellency. We protested to the colony
supervisor, but he said he could do nothing; the ambassadors had left, and
would not be returning. So the talks broke down. We blasted off for
Earth."
McKenzie
goggled incredulously. Spots of color appeared on his cheeks; his nostrils
widened in suppressed rage. "You realize what this ultimatum means. We're
at war with these creatures after all, despite everything ..."
Bernard
held up one hand, fighting to keep it steady. "Yoirf pardon, Excellency. I
haven't finished telling of our journey."
"There's more?"
"Much more. You see, we became lost trying to return home. Commander Laurance and
his men spent hours trying to get us back on course, but there was nothing they
could do. We emerged from no-space, finally, in the region of the Greater
Magellanic Cloud." Bernard felt a band of tightness in his stomach. The
words rolled glibly from his lips, though he knew each one drove a maddening
wedge deep into the Technarch's mind. "We were lost, fifty thousand
parsecs from Earth, and no way of returning. But suddenly our ship was
129
taken
over by an irresistible force. We were drawn down to a planet in the Magellanic
Cloud, inhabited by beings that identified themselves as the Rosgollans. Strange beings—with wonderful mental powers. Teleportation, psychokinesis, and many other abilities.
They—read our minds. Interrogated us. Found out about
our mission to the Norglans. And then-then they brought the two Norglan
ambassadors across space to meet with us again."
The
Technarch's facial expression had been changing all during Bernard's last few
sentences. Now McKenzie seemed to be staring silentiy off
into a void, face growing pale, eyes glazed and reflective.
"Go on," the
Technarch said in a terribly quiet voice.
"The
Rosgollans staged a kind of courtroom scene—examining our claims, dismissing
them. The Norglans got indignant, so the Rosgollans humiliated them—levitated
them, let them hang in the air, dropped them in a heap. It was a demonstration
of unmatchable power. And after it was over-after the Rosgollans had shown us
we could not hope to question their orders—they divided the galaxy into Terran
and Norglan spheres."
"Divided it?"
"Yes.
Here—I have the chart on a flat projection. It's a line that runs right through
the heart of our galaxy. Everything on this side is ours; everything on the
other side, Norglan. And if either side crosses the boundary line, or if we
leave the confines of our galaxy, the Rosgollan scouts will discover it and
administer punishment."
The
Technarch took the star-chart from Bernard with a leaden hand, looked at it for
an instant, shoved it roughly to one side. He seemed
to sigh.
"You aren't—making all
this up, Bernard?"
"No,
Excellency. It's all true. The Rosgollans are out there, half a million years
cleverer than we are—and they hinted that there were other races even more
poweif ul, in the distant reaches of the universe."
"And
we have to keep in line—like small boys in school— Norglans over here, Terrans
over there—while the Rosgollans make sure we don't get out of step. Is that it?"
The Technarch's face became a mask of rigid anguish. He leaned for-
130
ward,
gripping the top of his desk with big, powerful hands. He squeezed the desk
top, closing his eyes, grimacing with inner torment.
Something
shattered inside the Technarch. His shoulders seemed to slump; his face sagged,
the wide mouth drooped, the massive forearms lost their strength and dangled
limply. Bernard stared at the floor. Watching McKenzie break in this instant
was like watching a monument tumble to destruction; it was painful to see.
When
McKenzie spoke again, it was in a different voice, with none of the metallic
inner strength of his Technarch tone. "I guess this expedition didn't work
out so well, then. I sent you out as representatives of the finest race in the
galaxy—and you come back defeated—crushed . . ."
"But
we got what we went for, after all!" Bernard protested. "You sent us
out to divide the galaxy with the Norglans—and we succeeded in that!"
The
sophistry sounded hollow the moment he had uttered it. McKenzie smiled
strangely. "You succeeded? I sent you out to divide the universe; you came back with half a galaxy apportioned to you. It's not the same thing at all, is it,
Bernard?"
"Excellency . .
."
"So all my dreams are over. I thought in my lifetime I'd see Terrans
ranging the farthest reaches of the universe— and instead we're hemmed into
half a galaxy, by the mercy of our masters. And that's the end, isn't it,
Bernard? Once a limit has been set, once someone puts a fence around us— that
ends all our dreams of infinity."
"No, Excellency! That's where you're wrong!"
"Eh?" McKenzie asked, startled. It
was probably the first time since he had assumed the mande
of the Technarchonate that anyone had so flatly contradicted him. But now he
had hardly the strength to be angry.
Bernard said, "This isn't the end,
Excellency. I admit we aren't in the same position of supremacy we were in
before Laurance discovered the Norglans—but we never were in that
position of supremacy! We never were the lords of creation. It only
seemed that way, because we'd never come
131
across any
other race. Now, for the first time, we see our true position.
"Sure,
it isn't a position of supremacy. We're a long way from that. We're too young,
too new, to have the kind of power we thought we had.
There are the Norglans in our own galaxy, just as strong as we are, probably.
And outside the galaxy the Rosgollans, and who knows what greater races than
those? But now we have something definite to work for. We have finite goals
instead of vague, indefinite ones. We know we have to work to evolve past the
Norglans, toward the Rosgollans. When we're in their class, we'll legitimately be able to hold our heads up in pride, except
that we'll be past the point of needing pride.
"I
think we're an even younger race than the Norglans, Excellency. But we've
caught and equalled them, for all their speed in building colonies—and I think
the Rosgollans are, afraid of us, too. They see how fast we're developing—they
know it's only a thousand years since we entered the age of machines, and they
see how far we've come in that time. They're watching us, worried, anxious.
They want to put checks on us now so we don't overdevelop, spill out into the
universe faster than we ought to.
"The
Rosgollan boundary will guarantee that we don't bite off more than we can chew,
Excellency. But we've got all the future ahead of us. Tomorrow belongs to us. We've had a setback, maybe, but it isn't really a setback—just an end to
our complacency, a beginning of the realization that we're not the be-all and
end-all of creation. That we still have a long way to go.
So that's why we can't let this throw us, Technarch McKenzie."
Bernard
stopped. He felt like a small boy lecturing his schoolmaster. But the old
relationships no longer held; and this strangely limp man behind the big desk
was no longer the figure of awe he had once been.
In a
muffled, hollow voice, McKenzie said. "Maybe— maybe you're right, Bernard.
But—but it isn't easy to accept."
"Of
course not, Excellency."
McKenzie looked up. "I wanted to forge
Man's empire in the stars. With these hands, I wanted to build it."
"We haven't lost that hope, Excellency."
132
"No. We haven't. But I have. You'll never know how I dreamed, Bernard. And now those dreams can
only be realized by our remote descendants—thousands of years from now."
Bernard shook his head vehemently. He
struggled for some way of communicating to the Technarch the surge of optimism
that gripped him.
"Excellency—don't you see that we can't
be stopped? We've got the current running with us. We'll climb back to the
place where we thought—in our blindness—that we were. On the
top."
"Yes.
Someday, perhaps, we will," said McKenzie tonelessly. "But I won't
live to see it, Bernard, nor will you nor any of us nor even our children's
children. And I had
wanted to see it. To build it, Bernard. To shape
tomorrow with my hands. Can you understand that, man? II Mel II While I
livel"
A
deep sob racked the Technarch's body. Bernard looked away awkwardly, trying to
pretend he had not seen. He felt helpless to stop this man's grieving. There
was nothing he could possibly say, no imaginable word of sympathy, nothing
whatever to be done for this massive man whose dreams of cosmic empire-building
had tumbled so quickly into the dust.
The
Technarch's lips moved wordlessly, beyond the man's control for a moment. Then,
with a powerful effort, he mastered himself and said flatly, quietly, "All
right, Bernard. You can put the report in writing and submit it the proper way.
Tell the entire story, from beginning to end, just as you told it to me. Don't
gloss anything over. Understood?"
"Yes, Excellency. Is there—is there anything else I can >do . ..?"
A pause. Then: "Get out of here, that's all.
Just leave me alone. Tell Naylor I won't be seeing anyone else today. Get out of here!"
"Hearkening, Excellency."
A lump of pity clogged Bernard's throat as he
made a formal bow to the Technarch, still a formidable figure in his black
cloak of office. McKenzie was obviously fighting to keep his craggy features
under control while Bernard still remained in the room. Then, unable to bear
the sight, Bernard
133
turned and
rushed away, through the irising sphincter into the ante-chamber.
Dominici,
Stone, and Havig waited there for him, sitting tensely upright on the carved
bench at the far well. Bernard realized that his face and body were soaked with
perspiration, that his hands were clenching and
unclenching of their own volition.
"Well?" Stone asked jumpily.
"How did he take the news, Bernard?"
The sociologist shrugged. "Badly."
The single word made its effect. Dominici
asked, "Did you tell him everything?"
"The
works," Bernard said solemnly. "I didn't pull any punches. You could
see his face crumble when it all sank in. He wanted to see mankind out and
planting colonies in Andromeda while
he was still Technarch. I guess he won't." Bernard let a slow smile cross
his face. "I pity him. The man's a monolith.
He may not be able to adjust to the situation."
"Don't underestimate
him," Stone said. "He's a great man."
"Great,
yes, but this may destroy him; I hope not," Bernard said. "Maybe
he'll have the strength to adjust to it. But he'll never be the same man
again."
Naylor,
the Technarch's man, came shuffling into the antechamber, his face a careful
professional blank. Bernard wondered how Naylor would react when he found his
master in a state of near-shock. Probably go into shock himself, Bernard thought.
Naylor
said, "Have you gentlemen concluded your audience with the
Technarch?"
"Yes,
we have," Bernard said. "And the Technarch asked me to pass a message
along to you."
"Sir?"
"He
said that he doesn't want to see anyone else for the rest of the day."
"Yes, sir. Very good, sir." Naylor flicked the
matter into the back of his mind. "Shall I make arrangements for your
homeward trips?"
"Yes."
While
Naylor busily set up the transmat coordinates, Bernard made his last goodbyes
to the men with whom he had
134
joined in
this unhappy venture into the kingdoms of the stars. Stone,
now a dismal, hopeless figure, his life's basis as shattered as that of the
Technarch; Dominici, cocky as always, unruffled by his experience, at least
outwardly; Havig, austere, withdrawn, pious, but at least no longer aloof.
They were all men, Bernard thought.
He was glad to have known
them.
The moment had come to
leave, now. "Mr. Bernard, sir?"
Naylor called.
"So long,"
Bernard said.
"God go with
you," Havig called after him.
Bernard
smiled and stepped through the transmat, emerging in his own flat, four thousand miles away in London. Everything was as he
left it; everything seemed to be waiting for him. Even the air smelled fresh,
not at all as though he had left the apartment for so long a span as he had. It
was all there—the books, the pipe, the music, the brandy—waiting for him to
slip back into his comfortable life at the point where he had stepped out.of
it.
But it would never be the
same again, Bernard thought.
Never the same again for
any of us.
He
walked to the window, looking - out past the foggy London night to the faint
glimmering stars that managed to make their way through the haze.
Never the same again. But,
somehow, deep within his soul, he felt that everything was going to work out
for the best; that—though neither he nor the unhappy Technarch nor any man now
walking the Earth would live to see it—mankind would someday be taking its
rightful place in the stars.