Robert Wells
First-contact-with-alien-life stories are always intriguing because primarily the plot must revolve around communication in some form or another. New author Robert Wells approaches the problem in a fascinating manner.
* * * *
Things were distinctly strange from the start. There were those unexpected orange lights peeling back off the hull like fish scales. Then the complete radio blackout falling like a curtain between the ship, its base, and its destination, and the navigation panel playing tricks on its exasperated crew.
Jerman, a landlubber, wanted to turn back at once, but the Captain only grinned at his consternation. You never knew what you might meet out here in the enormous, empty mind of space. Besides, the Jubilee was the only shot for New Erin in thirty days and was carrying Cornel, a sick man whose sickness couldn’t wait for the next home-bound ship. ‘We keep going,’ said the Captain. ‘Nothing stops an ambulance. You’ll get used to meeting the unaccountable out here.’
But whatever it was didn’t give them a chance to change their minds. After an interval which ensured that they were too far out to be able to return, it struck again decisively.
The analog course computers went first. The duty rating reported the warning light as soon as it flashed in the monitor, but before the Captain could even get to the flight deck the instrument panel blew up. There was a nerve-jarring arc of light and all the pointers swung to zero across the control console.
In the navigation cockpit the maps of stars and the highways plotted across them dissolved, leaving the screens blank, the veiled, milky eyeballs of a blind man.
At the same moment power in two of the main propulsion units ceased and when the craft could be brought under control again it was already deep into a chartless region.
The sick mind of Cornel seemed to have some means of perceiving this turning of the tables on the plans of his sane companions. Lashed to a couch in his cabin, he began to cry the same phrase over and over again in the voice of a dishonoured prophet. Its five words made no sense to anyone but him, yet still had a sinister ring for the Jubilee’s crew in their predicament. ‘Into the waters ...” he proclaimed. ‘Into the waters of night!’
‘Shall I quiet him?’ asked Jerman. He was a psychiatrist detailed to accompany Cornel from the frontiers back home for treatment.
‘Leave him. We need you here,’ said the Captain. He ran a hand through his short-cropped grey hair, looking around at the crewmen still stunned and injured by the incident. He was very experienced. He had been through emergencies before, but never one thrust upon him so startlingly. Behind the determination in the hard, ice-blue eyes the mind was racing, calculating.
The voyage was about one hundred and fifty space-days old. Prior to the accident there had been maybe another forty ahead of them before they got to the settled areas of New Erin.
The Captain put on a pressurised work-suit and spent an hour with his chief engineer inspecting the ship. Afterwards he dropped back lightly into the cockpit of the flight deck.
He betrayed no emotion. Since before birth his society had conditioned him and trained him as a spacer and he had seen worse damage and ships that had survived it on much more arduous journeys than the Jubilee’s routine run. What was really worrying him was the apparent deflection from the recognised warp into unexplored voids and the inexplicable readings on the instruments which had resumed their function. Of course they weren’t working correctly, but if they had been the indications they gave would have meant that somehow Jubilee and its crew had disappeared from the regular space-time ellipse.
The fission fuel they carried was virtually indestructible, but it might become debilitated if serious loads were placed on it in an effort to realign the ship to its correct course.
Basic training and the manuals set out rigid procedures to be followed in any emergency. The Captain talked to his lieutenant over the ship’s radio. ‘Bell, test the crash generators. If they’re still working see if you can beam a message to Fallada for relay to the Agency Control. Tell them we’ve been thrown off course. I think that basically it’s a feed failure causing stress debilitation in the propulsion units. There’s a serious power loss. Several input sections are completely unresponsive. I shall have to stabilise to repair and conserve power. Ask if they can plot our position; what kind of boost we’ll need to get back on track; whether there’s any known landfall site handy.’
It was two hours before the radio-link man got any response. When the reply did come the words were faint after the oceans of emptiness they had swum. Sometimes they were obliterated altogether by hurtling swarms of meteorites or the huge messages of exploded stars hurrying between galaxies to no particular destination. The words had a strange ring about them, too.
‘You-er estimated plot five one six blank blank in Hydra. Three four degrees blank of track. Region not mapped. Regret no precise asteroidal data. If-er situation hazardous advise if tug required in which case fade fade fade outlined procedure three-er six.’
‘Reply,’ said the Captain tersely. ‘Thanks. See we’re on our own. Couldn’t survive tug wait. Must try for landfall to save all power during repair. Will coast. If no suitable site appears will consult again. All here in good spirits. Until next message—so long.’
But this courageous response was stripped of all meaning almost as soon as it had been sent, for the radio blanket fell again, more thoroughly than ever, and the Jubilee’s apparatus could receive nothing more.
They were alone. Every second carried them farther away on their thirty-four degree variation. The attendant shoals of lights returned and flowed back along the hull into the deeps behind them.
‘Into the waters of night!’ Cornel screamed. ‘Into the waters of night!’
Double watches were set at all tele-observation posts and the chief engineer coaxed enough power from the domestic circuits to operate Jubilee’s scanners.
On the second space-day after the emergency Bell reported the craft moving into a scattered planetary system.
Jerman and the Captain joined him at one of the forward screens and watched the ponderous approach of the nearest body. The Captain had to use some of the ship’s power to hold off from the gravitational field drag.
He looked with his unemotional eyes moving slowly across the scanner screen. ‘One of them may provide a landfall.’ He turned to the engineer. ‘Can we make a landing manoeuvre?’
‘Should be possible with care, sir. The Fernlock brake-systems aren’t affected. As long as we can get a kick from at least two of the prop units I think she’ll make it.’
‘They’ll send a search team from Fallada anyway if they don’t hear anything from us,’ said the Captain to no one in particular. ‘Never mind. We must try to make a landfall to get repairs under way. If any suitable place presents itself, Bell, call me at once. I’ll take the controls myself.’
Jerman went with the Captain to his cabin. They fastened themselves to the relaxation couches. ‘Chess?’ the Captain inquired. He touched the fingertip control on the arm of his couch and above him the board lit up set with the last position of their unfinished game.
‘I’d rather talk,’ said the psychiatrist after a couple of indecisive moves. He was a lot younger than the Captain and his thin, straw-coloured hair wasn’t cut short enough to prevent it often falling forward over his forehead, giving him a rakish, student look.
He found it difficult to converse with spacers. They were trained not to deal in imagination, speculation, hypothesis, or pure abstraction. But in their present plight Jerman felt unequal to the inevitable chess defeat.
‘I guess you’ve seen a number of these worlds, Captain?’
‘Seven planetary systems around suns,’ the Captain recited. ‘Two dead masses without known orbit. A long time ago. When I was still young enough to be a pioneer.’ He sighed and closed his eyes. He was quite prepared to sleep if Jerman didn’t want to play chess with him.
‘Any of them carry life?’
‘None. Not our sort of life. Sometimes primitive botanical or chemical structures. Why?’
‘Only because this is an unexplored region,’ said Jerman uncomfortably, ‘and it gives me the creeps. I begin to wonder what we might find....’
‘You’ve never explored, of course,’ said the Captain. “You know, the more we push the frontiers forward the more we become convinced that no form of life equal to homo sapiens has evolved anywhere in the approachable parts of the galaxy.’
It was a predictable answer from a member of the Captain’s profession. It appeared (Jerman figured) somewhere between page three and page seven of any Cosmonaut Manual.
The Captain continued: ‘There were the Kappa II voles and in remote history the sub-human Troitans. I guess you know the lay branch of Space History anyway. The Abeniatiks—they even developed a primitive form of hydro-propulsion in their tepid seas. They were the only reasoning organisms Man encountered. Everywhere we’ve been welcomed and adulated as superior beings. On the evidence that’s what we are. We have no serious rivals.’
‘All the species you mentioned are extinct now?’
‘They ceased to evolve.’ The Captain re-extinguished them with a wave of his hand. ‘Contact with more complex and more highly developed organisms proved fatal to them.’
‘Exactly. What I was trying to suggest is that perhaps some day, beyond the present frontiers or off the beaten space tracks—maybe right here, for example—we may be the ones to get an unpleasant shock.’ Jerman’s boyish face was puckered up with his concern to get his worry across to the spacer. He shoved his hair out of his eyes.
The Captain yawned. ‘I only know what is or has been. Go to sleep or you’ll end up like that poor, deranged creature we’re supposed to be hurrying to New Erin.’
‘And that’s another thing,’ the psychiatrist persisted. ‘We’ve got millions of years of evolution behind us and here we are, the superior beings, still with a flaw which makes a nonsense of our greatest asset—our unique asset— the power to reason. Cornel’s mind is broken...’
‘Complex machinery breaks down,’ snapped the Captain. ‘At New Erin cephologists will analyse the fault. Cornel will be restored if the damage isn’t too great. His sort of defeat is slowly being eliminated—the way we’ve eliminated all the others.’
Jerman said nothing and after a minute’s silence he heard the Captain breathing quietly as he slept.
The Jubilee drove on for two space-days, swallowing the emptiness between the planets, the glowing butt of its nose aimed at the system’s red dwarf sun.
Bell, a heavy man with the same hard eyes as his captain, dropped into the cabin and woke the uneasy sleepers there.
‘Sir, we’ve picked up a planet that’s within the prescribed graph range.’
‘Has it been rechecked?’
‘Yes. The spectrum indicates vestigial atmosphere of nontoxic gases and the presence of surface liquid.’
The Captain scrambled up. While Bell took over the control console he and Jerman watched the planet’s approach on one of the scanners.
The Captain checked the instruments himself. He reached a decision rapidly. ‘Lieutenant, have all hands stand-by. We’ll try to go into orbit immediately and identify a suitable site for landfall.’
It was a difficult manoeuvre for the crippled ship, but several hours later Jubilee was orbiting the planet within a band of numerous asteroidal satellites on a track which took it diagonally between the poles.
‘Water,’ said Bell. ‘It looks to me like all damn’ water.’
It was very dark—night-blue or violet at the distance from which they observed it.
‘I thought I made out something different in Red Sector last time round,’ said one of the ratings.
‘What?’ asked Bell.
‘Kind of islands or rocks or atolls or something, sir. Water seemed to be breaking.’
‘Concentrate all your viewers on Red Sector,’ the Captain ordered. ‘If you see anything enlarge it on the screen here.’
They orbited again. The domestic circuits had all been drained to summon sufficient power to operate the control instruments and the emergency drive equipment. There was no hot food; light and power in the living quarters had been eliminated and the gravity drag was so reduced that any sudden action had to be carefully controlled.
They tracked over the vital sector yet once more. ‘There!’ shouted Bell and Jerman together. ‘There it is!’
The rating closed the tuning control. Red Sector came up on the captain’s screen and expanded as the instrument enlarged the crucial spot to full capacity.
‘Hold it,’ cried Bell. ‘It won’t go any more.’
‘It’s a chain of small islands,’ murmured the Captain. ‘We’ll put an instrumented slave rocket in to check them. Bell, you see to it.’
‘Will our radio be strong enough to pick up the signals though?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to take a chance anyway. Fortunately the range is short.’
‘Where shall I put it in, sir ?’ One of the ratings stood by ready to push the blast button.
‘Try that large atoll—the one like a broken ellipse.’ The Captain’s eyes were hard, icy again. ‘Hell! That sea’s as dark as night—huh?’
The psychiatrist looked at the Captain. He jerked the wisps of hair back out of his eyes and looked around at the crew. He seemed to be the only one who had found the Captain’s comment significant. The crew were all impassively about their business. Rigid training compelled each one of them to concentrate on the job in hand and only that. Imagination had no part in their everyday affairs.
Hardly daring to trust his own imagination, Jerman got out of his seat carefully and floated from the cockpit. He fancied that the Captain rewarded him with a brief glance of annoyance as he went, but he couldn’t be sure of this.
With the words still echoing in his head, he made his way to Cornel’s cabin. The sedative he had given the sick man would certainly have worn off by now. Jerman dreaded having to open the padded door to hear again those prophetic cries. But when he looked through the peephole into the cell it was much worse. Cornel was peacefully asleep for the first time in weeks; and there was an innocent smile on his face. He looked like someone who had come home after a long, hard journey.
* * * *
The planet upon which Jubilee finally achieved a landing enjoyed a long day and a brief unnatural night illuminated by a mauve glow from its numerous attendant asteroids.
While the crew worked at the damage to discover its true extent and repair it if they could, the Captain made several exploratory journeys in the uni-jet cutter. There was nothing within range to be found. Apart from the string of small atolls where the Jubilee now rested uncertainly on its landing probes, the surface of the planet in that vicinity seemed to be covered by a tideless sheet of liquid, empty of marine life. For want of a better name this came to be known to the travellers as The Sea and its constituent water. In fact it was neither, being of a composition which defied analysis.
As a routine measure on any new landfall, planned or not, the Captain ordered samples to be taken up and sealed. But the liquid defied capture. It either spontaneously destroyed itself or changed structurally under unfamiliar conditions and environment. The containers were always perfectly empty, perfectly dry within a few hours of being filled.
The ship had been on the planet several Earth-long days when the Emissaries arrived. No one recognised them as such. Jerman, in fact, suffered a disappointment.
His patient had been enjoying a period of strange, almost lucid tranquillity since landfall. When the powerful voices began to speak to him, the mind therapist didn’t recognise them at first as in any way extra-human. He just believed that poor Cornel’s madness had returned.
Only the failure of his most potent drugs disturbed him sufficiently into taking careful notice of Cornel’s ravings.
After checking to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, he called the Captain.
We convert er to you speech through this er your colleague. Cornel’s lips didn’t move. The strange sounds, distorted and with a marked reverberation like a maladjusted loud-speaker system among mountains, issued from his throat.
We welcome you er to (here the name, syllable after syllable of it, was lost upon the human ear). We are all er around you but cannot manifest er as our planes existence separate from er yours and dangerous to adjust er. We intend you no harm. we repeat er no harm. Your vehicle damage is not er repairable without er our assistance.
‘Bloody nonsense,’ snarled the Captain. ‘You didn’t just drag me here to suffer the ravings of this madman, I hope ?’
Jerman didn’t reply. The message boomed on heedlessly.
We er recommend you take er account of our terms for assistance your safe conduct back to er your being.
‘The hell! I won’t listen to any more.’ The Captain flushed angrily to the roots of his grey hair. He wrenched open the door of Cornel’s cell and stalked away.
The voices in Cornel insisted without a pause. They seemed now to be directed at Jerman.
You er of the unclosed mind have heard. WE return er tomorrow and repeat once more our terms. You must er convince your commander we are reasonable and terms will also be reasonable. we salute you. Until tomorrow.
Jerman got his mouth open to reply, but the words stuck in his dry throat.
Cornel was a crumpled heap on the couch. He looked like a puppet flung down after a performance, its strings released. Jerman, looking even more like a scolded schoolboy, licked his lips and crept out to find the Captain.
That night the section of feed line which it had taken days to shape and link, dissolved at the welds and the Jubilee was left as crippled as when it had landed.
Grimly the Captain rationed the ship’s supplies. He divided the crew into watches and they worked round the clock to repair the mischief, but their sophisticated tools, although they continued to function perfectly, now had small effect on the damage. It seemed as though a screen had dropped between them and the ship. Showers of orange sparks fell to the ground and vanished as they laboured in vain.
Each evening Jerman returned to Cornel’s cell to maintain contact with the Emissaries. The madman seemed hardly to have an existence of his own. He was silent all day, a vehicle for communication only; empty except when the planet’s visitors had use for him.
Each time they returned, their demands for discussion with the Captain became more urgent, their language more uncompromising.
Three days after the first visitation the Captain finally abandoned the attempt to repair Jubilee. He issued a double ration of food and drugs to the exhausted crew.
Nearly everyone slept where he had eaten. Only Jerman sought out the Captain in the deserted radio cockpit where his latest efforts to arouse a response had encountered the now perpetual silence.
Their eyes met. ‘You’ve admitted to yourself that they exist, haven’t you?’ said Jerman.
The spacer looked away. He looked older and his pale eyes less resolute than when the emergency had first hit Jubilee. ‘I can’t understand what it is they wish to do with us. What do they want? They have us here at their mercy. They can take whatever it is—the ship, our lives—everything !’
‘You’ll never know what it is unless you come and talk to them.’
‘How can you expect me to go in there and hold a conversation with a madman?’
‘It isn’t Cornel who’s speaking,’ Jerman urged. ‘You know what—I think they’ve chosen him because of his affliction. Reason left his mind and gave them a loophole to enter it. Maybe they’ve been waiting for centuries. I believe they ambushed us when they knew what we were carrying in our sick-bay. Now they have a purpose for us.’
‘Let’s go,’ said the Captain. ‘We’ll find out.’
The two men traversed the sleeping ship. At the cell door Jerman cautiously opened the peephole. Cornel was moving restlessly on his couch.
‘Open the door,’ ordered the Captain. He preceded the psychiatrist into the cell. Cornel subsided into a motionless heap.
We all salute er you. Captain. We salute er you. The Emissary voice—or was it a chorus of voices ?—spoke from the depths of other worlds through the breach in the wall which they had awaited so long and chosen so fastidiously.
Politely but uncompromisingly the terms for the safe conduct of Jubilee were outlined.
The Emissaries—they had no name which humans could understand—had for centuries watched the progress of humanity across the galaxy. Now at this frontier the time for demarcation had come. Human expansion might continue in other directions, but there must be no encroachment upon sections of the galaxy long since the heritage of the Emissaries’ own, distinctive culture.
The powers of the Emissaries in their own sphere were sufficient to prevent the repair and departure of the humans’ space craft. Its arrival had been carefully planned and engineered (as Jerman had suspected) because of the presence on board of Cornel.
In return for the saving of the expedition the Emissaries required the Captain to return to the human colonised parts of the galaxy taking with him the Emissaries’ demarcation warning.
‘But why can’t our two evolutions come together and cooperate?’ asked the Captain. Having drowned his scepticism on the possibility of other, reasoning beings he found his space-ethical training surfacing once more. ‘Two cultures such as yours and mine could exercise a tremendous force for good. Great gaps in the knowledge of both our creations—our development and the universe we share—all these could be closed in a single co-operative act.’
You, a human, have er the audacity to suggest this ? So far as human emotions were identifiable in the Emissaries, the question seemed to contain both incredulity and mirth. What happened to every evolutionary movement with which humanity has come into contact? IT has been destroyed. We do not choose to argue. (The Captain choked on the retort that came to his lips.) We er offer you these terms.
We cannot destroy you but you will destroy yourselves if er you refuse to carry our warnings back to your kind. The link er between you as you are now and you as you were is very tenuous.
The Captain shrugged. ‘I can’t guarantee that my civilisation will believe me or even if it does that it will take notice of your warning.’
We ask only that you carry the message.
‘I shall do it.’
There is one condition more.
The Captain didn’t respond and the voices continued: You will leave er to us and in our care the man cornel through whom we speak to you.
The Captain opened his mouth to reply but closed it again before any sound escaped. Jerman couldn’t tell from his expression whether the response was to have been a flat negative or an indifferent assent.
What do you say. Captain ?
‘No member of our race may be left in the hands of strangers.’
But this being is already alien to you. His brain we know has not the reason which distinguishes yours.
After a short silence the Captain said, ‘I must have time to consider this.’
One hour ?
‘I shall return tomorrow.’
Jerman caught his arm. His hair flopped down over his anxious, boyish face. ‘Agree now,’ he whispered frantically. ‘It’s our only hope of getting out of this.’
‘I shall return tomorrow,’ said the Captain as though he hadn’t heard.
Commander, we salute er you. Until tomorrow. We shall await you er here.
Their last echoes faded down the long corridors through which they came. The Emissaries were gone. Cornel stirred, woke, looked at the two men who so unexpectedly shared his cell and began to laugh uncontrollably.
* * * *
Can they hear us? Can they see what we think? Jerman wrote out the questions with a shaky hand on a page ripped from a calculation block and shoved it across the table to the Captain.
They were in the Captain’s cabin with Bell. The crew had been informed of the new developments in their predicament. Time was running out and still the Captain hadn’t revealed his decision.
He looked at the young psychiatrist compassionately. He didn’t answer the question. He said calmly: ‘I can’t give them Cornel. You know that.’
‘But why not? He’s lost to humanity already. We only had a certain time-margin to get him to New Erin. That must have run out by now. Even with his mind in the care of the best doctors we have it couldn’t be saved now. You can’t sacrifice all the rest of us....’
‘The procedure is quite clear,’ said the Captain. ‘Article 18. No human organism, living or dead, must be abandoned where it may fall into the possession of powers alien to the human race.’
‘Cornel is useless to them,’ cried Jerman. ‘He’s not even human any more.’
‘Precisely. And why is he not ? Because his mind is shattered. Tell me: what carried us from the old seas of Earth to walk upright, to conquer Solar and stretch out among the stars? Reason! Awareness of ourselves. Now then, if you were another reasoning life form which saw in Man only a threat to your existence how would you cripple Man?’
‘You’d take away his reason,’ said Bell. The chunky lieutenant’s face was screwed up anxiously as he looked at his commander. He looked resigned. Trained in the same thought patterns as the Captain, he had readily foreseen how the argument must end.
‘No,’ said Jerman. ‘No—I don’t believe it.’
‘Oh, yes. That’s why they want Cornel,’ said the Captain patiently. ‘They will take his mind apart to discover how they may be able to alter all human minds. When they’ve done the research they need to do they’ll be able to speak in all our minds just like they speak now in Cornel’s. It will be a weapon against which humanity hasn’t even begun to consider defences.’
‘But haven’t they done it already?’ argued Jerman. ‘They’ve already found their way into Cornel.’
‘Yes. But I think that until they can get him outside the ship and start the process of transmuting him to the same plane of existence as themselves and their damned water they won’t be able to get down to details and analysis. Perhaps at the moment they know how but not why. They’ve only scratched the surface of their purpose.’
‘We’re going to miss an opportunity which may never occur again in our lifetime. We could be the ones to carry back to humanity the news of another powerful reasoning force in the universe!’
‘The price is too high,’ said the Captain. ‘And maybe we would be carrying the seeds of destruction of our own intelligence at the same time.’
‘Suppose their motives are purely defensive?’
‘Yes, I’ve considered that. For heavens’ sake! Do you think I don’t want to go on living, too, Jerman? What logic tells me is that any intelligence which so carefully plans and awaits its opportunity isn’t likely to remain defensive and content in its own sphere for ever.’
The Captain paused. He said with a sigh, ‘Perhaps one day we shall come together. All that we here can do now is to deny them one step in their plan.’
‘Suppose they can hear us now? Won’t they try to stop us?’ It was Bell, still resigned, only planning along with the Captain the last, logical steps they must take.
‘No. I think that within the ship they’re powerless. Anyhow, we’ll see. Let’s go.’
The three men shook hands.
‘But they said they couldn’t destroy,’ said Jerman desperately as they left the cabin.
‘Oh, yes,’ said the Captain, ‘but you recall that they added: You will destroy yourselves. Now—I think I see what they mean. Just think! How much beard have you grown since the emergency hit us? Why won’t any of the chronometers work—not even those you wind and set by hand?’
Jerman and Bell stared at him. The psychiatrist half shook his head. Bell said, ‘Jees!’ softly.
‘I think,’ said the Captain calmly, ‘that to get us here at all it was necessary for them to take us out of time—our time—and suspend us between their being and ours. Unfortunately only they have the secret of how to put us back.’
The crew were informed of what the Captain had decided to do. The ship was silent as the Captain, followed by Bell and Jerman led the way to Cornel’s cabin. Jerman thought he could hear the thud of the heavy holster against the Captain’s hip at every step he took.
As soon as the cell door was open the Emissaries launched a barrage of threats and cajolery. You er reasoning beings surely cannot destroy yourselves out of petty conceit. think again. We demand er that you reconsider...
The Captain withdrew the short-range atomiser from its holster. He primed it patiently, seeming to invite the visitants to intervene if they could.
No, Commander ! No! It is absurd to do er this. We insist. We have a further suggestion ...
‘Thank you,’ said the Captain. ‘I think the first round belongs to us after all.’ There was only the merest hint of fanaticism in his voice.
He levelled the weapon. At that range its penetration was absolute whatever barrier the Emissaries might try to interpose. The invaded organ would be destroyed.
‘Into the night...’ moaned Cornel. ‘Into the waters of night.’
‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the Captain. ‘This time I think we’ll be coming with you.’ He squeezed the trigger.
All the hands on their watches and on the Jubilee’s chronometers jerked convulsively forward, marking a fraction of time. The instrument panel blew up. There was a nerve-jarring arc of light and all the pointers swung to zero across the control console. The maps of stars and the highways plotted across them dissolved, leaving the screens blank—the veiled, milky eyeballs of a blind man.
A second later there was nothing; only the infinitely empty darkness and drifting off the spaceway between the frontier and New Erin a black, weightless cinder.