Its roof was vaulted; its circular walls were lined with panels studded with gleaming control buttons, levers, colored lights. As they watched light flicked on and off in changing patterns, registering the progressive changes in the vast complex of mechanisms for which this must be the central control station. Behind those boards circuits opened and closed in bewildering confusion; the two invaders felt the rapid shifting of magnetic fields, the fury of electrons boiling in vacuum. . . .
For long moments they forgot the pursuit, forgot everything in wonder at this place whose remotest like they had never seen in the simplicity of their machineless culture. In all the brilliant space there was no life. They looked at one another, the same thought coming to both at once: perhaps, after two thousand years, the masters were dead after all, and only the machines remained? As if irresistibly drawn, they stepped over the threshold.
There was a clang of metal like a signal. Halfway up the wall opposite, above a narrow ramp that descended between the instrument panels, a massive doorway swung wide, and in its opening a figure stood.
Var and Neena huddled frozenly, half expecting each instant to be their last. And the Ryzga too stood motionless, looking down at them.
HE WAS a man of middle height and stocky build, clad in a garment of changing colors, of fabric delicate as dream-stuff. In his right hand, with the care one uses with a weapon, he grasped a gleaming metal tube; his other hand rested as for support against the frame of the doorway. That, and his movements when he came slowly down the ramp toward them, conveyed a queer suggestion of weariness or weakness, as if he were yet not wholly roused from his two millenia of slumber. But the Ryzga’s manner and his mind radiated a consciousness of power, a pride and assurance of self that smote them like a numbing blow.
With a new shock, Var realized that the Ryzga’s thoughts were quite open. They had a terse, disconnected quality that was strange and unsettling, and in part they were couched in alien and unintelligible symbols. But there was no block. Apparently the Ryzga felt no need to close his mind in the presence of inferior creatures. . . .
He paused with his back to the central control panel, and studied the interlopers with the dispassionate gaze of a scientist examining a new, but not novel, species of insect. His thoughts seemed to click, like metal parts of a mechanism falling into places prepared for them. The image occurred oddly to Var, to whom such a comparison would ordinarily have been totally strange.
“Culture: late barbarism. Handwork of high quality—good. Physically excellent stock. . . .” There was a complicated and incomprehensible schemata of numbers and abstract forms. “The time: two thousand years—more progress might have been expected, if any survivors at all initially postulated; but this will do. The pessimists were mistaken. We can begin again.” Then, startlingly super-imposed on the cool progression of logical thought, came a wave of raw emotion, devastating in its force. It was a lustful image of a world once more obedient, crawling, laboring to do the Ryzgas’ will—toward the stars, the stars! The icy calculation resumed: “Immobilize these and the ones indicated in the passage above. Then wake the rest. . . .”
Var was staring in fascination at the Ryzga’s face. It was a face formed by the custom of unquestioned command; yet it was lined by a deeply ingrained weariness, the signs of premature age—denied, overridden by the driving will they had sensed a moment earlier. It was a sick man’s face.
The Ryzga’s final thought clicked into place: Decision! He turned toward the switchboard behind him, reaching with practised certainty for one spot upon it.
Neena screamed.
Between the Ryzga and the control panel a nightmare shape reared up seven feet tall, flapping black amorphous limbs and flashing red eyes and white fangs. The Ryzga recoiled, and the weapon in his hand came up. There was an instantaneous glare like heat lightning, and the monster crumpled in on itself, twitched briefly and vanished.
But in that moment a light of inspiration had flashed upon Var, and it remained. As the Ryzga stretched out his hand again, Var acted. The Ryzga froze, teetering off balance and almost falling, as a numbing grip closed down on all his motor nerves.
Holding that grip, Var strode across the floor and looked straight into the Ryzga’s frantic eyes. They glared back at him with such hatred and such evil that for an instant he almost faltered. But the Ryzga’s efforts, as he strove to free himself from the neural hold, were as misdirected and unavailing as those of a child who has not learned to wrestle with the mind.
Var had guessed right. When Neena in her terror had flung a dream monster into the Ryzga’s way—a mere child’s bogey out of a fairy tale—the Ryzga had not recognized it as such, but had taken it for a real being. Var laughed aloud, and with great care, as one communicates with an infant, he projected his thoughts into the other’s mind. “There will be no new beginning for you in our world, Ryzga! In two thousand years, we’ve learned some new things. Now at last I understand why you built so many machines, such complicated arrangements of matter and energy to do simple tasks—it was because you knew no other way.”
Behind the hate-filled eyes the cold brain tried to reason still. “Barbarians . . .? Our party was wrong after all. After us the machine civilization could never rise again, because it was a fire that consumed its fuel. After us man could not survive on the Earth, because the conditions that made him great were gone. The survivors must be something else—capacities undeveloped by our science—after us the end of man, the beginning. . . . But those of us who chose to die were right.”
The tide of hate and sick desire rose up to drown all coherence. The Ryzga made a savage, wholly futile effort to lift the weapon in his paralyzed hand. Then his eyes rolled upward, and abruptly he went limp and fell in a heap, like a mechanical doll whose motive power has failed.
Var felt Neena beside him, and drew her close. As she sobbed her relief, he continued to look down absently at the dead man. When at last he raised his head, he saw that the drama’s end had had a further audience. In the outer doorway, backed by his clansmen, stood Groz, gazing first in stupefaction at the fallen Ryzga, then with something like awe at Var.
Var eyed him for a long moment; then he smiled, and asked, “Well, Groz? Is our feud finished, or does your ambition for a worthy son-in-law go beyond the conqueror of the Ryzgas?” • • • THE END
THE THOUSANDTH YEAR
The great trouble with logic is that it’s as weak as its weakest link—not as strong as its strongest. A logical civilization is deadly and unhappiness is an extremely weak link to build on!
The trap was ready to be sprung. Ratk warships, grim with black armor, astare with guns, swung light less and almost indetectable in a hundred orbits around the G0 sun. Tense-nerved technicians watched the indicators of electromagnetic and gravitic instruments that registered and plotted continuously the course of the approaching enemy ship.
And at the expeditionary force’s base on the second planet, behind the most formidable fortifications and batteries which it had been possible to set up in four years’ feverish effort, waited more thousands of Ratk. It was their duty to put up a desperate last-ditch fight in the unlikely but not inconceivable event that the enemy’s vessel’s unknown armaments should prove sufficient to overcome a hundred battle cruisers.
In the chartroom of his flagship the Great Ratk rested, sagging grossly in the commander’s chair. The weightlessness of orbital flight made his cervical tentacles drift round him like curls of smoke, but the sucker-feet on his underbody held him securely in his place. Screens before and above him reflected the diamonded blackness of leeward space.
“Give me the gravitometer readings again,” commanded the Great Ratk heavily.
The Second Greatest, the younger Aglur, read off the figures from the board he was keeping watch on. The Great Ratk Dumur—who had in anticipation been over and over the situation now unfolding, until its reality seemed to him like a recurrent dream—needed no more than the bare gravitometer data to assure
himself that the enemy was still approaching under constant deceleration, still cutting down the small fraction that remained of the terrific velocity which had brought him here out of unknown interstellar distances. There was no need for any change in the plan of ambush.
The younger Aglur added gratuitously, “The shape of the mass-diminution curve has been plotted now to the point where we can estimate the enemy’s rest-mass within a few tons—”
“I know!” the Great Ratk said irritably. “Keep your eye on the board, and inform me instantly there is any course change.”
The Great One had no doubt that this Aglur chafed—as indeed any properly green-blooded Ratk would—beneath the title of Second Greatest. Aglur would be waiting only for the present mission’s completion to poison his sole remaining superior and assume command. Then the lieutenant could return home as admiral and be feted with the greatest victory celebration in a thousand years of glorious Ratk history.
But, the Great Ratk told himself, they would see about that. He might be aging and he had been too occupied of late with his responsibilities as commander to devote much time to the usual precautions of intrigue and counter-intrigue; but his wits were still sharp. In his time he had managed to poison the elder Aglur, this one’s part-parent, and a good many others who had stood in the way of Dumur’s advancement in the service. And he had had a full share of victory celebrations, after the conflict with the Svi, for instance.
It was not, he assured himself, that his attitude toward young Aglur was tainted by any petty rancor. If he had caught his lieutenant in the slightest infringement of the articles of war, he would have had him executed on the spot, as the despotic authority of his office would entitle him to do. But of course Aglur was far too clever to be caught in any such missteps; and, for the rest, the Great One naturally approved of the spirit of competition and the qualities of ambition and ingenuity which it fostered. Without those qualities, the race of the Ratk might be—horrible to imagine—ready to fall easy prey to the aliens whose vessel was hurtling toward them now.
Dumur snapped a tentacle peremptorily at another of his officers, who hastened to switch on the battle chart with its medley of moving lights indicating the disposition of the fleet unit s. The familiar pattern of deployment for an englobement maneuver was soothing and reassuring.
He had need of reassurance. The moment of contact, now not far off, would be critical as no moment had been since the primordial Ratk had crawled out of the swamps. Never before had they faced a foe so totally unknown, yet paradoxically known for so long.
For a thousand years they had known. A thousand years, since first the instruments of a Ratk ship in interstellar space had betrayed the proximity of another mass that was also moving at close to light-velocity, an object that could only be another vessel, registering briefly while it passed a few billion miles away, lost from ken as the indicators settled back to zero and the mass-compasses swung idly again, defeated by the immensity of space.
From that moment of revelation the Ratk had begun to prepare. It was an appalling task they set themselves, to organize for war an interstellar empire that embraced 4 x 1020 cubic, miles—when communications limited by the speed of light took years or decades lo travel from one outpost to the next, when the logistics of defense and attack must be worked out in terms of generations of effort going into a single manuever, when an assault upon the empire’s flank could not become known to the central command for two or three hundred years. But the Ratk planners faced those staggering problems with the grim realization that they must solve them, for upon the solution would ultimately hinge the control of the galaxy. Never for a moment had they deluded themselves that the enemy had not made the discovery at the same time as themselves, or that they had any advantage over him save such as unremitting determination and attention to every smallest detail might give them.
Now, after a thousand years, the labor of those generations of strategists was paying off. At a time when the present Great Ratk was still a new-spawned infant, two outlying observation-posts detected the immense mass of a body moving close to limiting velocity. They beamed their findings to garrisons farther back from the periphery, where for the first time separate observations could be correlated to obtain a reliable determination of an enemy vessel’s line of flight. Then it was possible—with the margin of time gained by the slight advantage of the speed of radio messages over that of the enemy ship—to launch an interception fleet toward the hitherto unoccupied star system for which that ship was evidently making.
The problem was similar to that which would be presented by trying to intercept a hostile aircraft traveling at almost the speed of sound, with no better means of alerting the defense network than by relaying shouted warnings—but the problem had been solved. The fleet commanded by Dumur had reached the G0 sun with almost four years’ lead on the enemy—four years they had spent in panting preparation, constructing fortifications, sinking mines, building factories on the second planet to turn out more ships and armaments, toward the day that was now come.
Aglur spoke up again: “Great One, the outer stations report that they think they can pick up a visual image.”
“Very well—tell them to try.” The Great Ratk relaxed his sucker-feet and floated toward the still-blank telescreen beyond the battle chart. Outwardly he was impassive as befitted a veteran, but inwardly he was aflame with eagerness and with impatience as the screen lighted and at first showed only swimming glimpses of stars and fitfully shifting images.
For a thousand years, the enemy had been the trembling of the indicator-needle, a little irregularity in the curves on a graph, vague blotches appearing and fading on a long-range detector screen—no more. Such instrument-sightings had been numerous enough to be maddening. Ships passed in the tremendous night of space, at peak velocities of interstellar flight where any thought of matching speeds and making contact—when even a slight course change would make fuel reserves melt away—was out of the question. Faithfully the observation posts on the scattered planets reported the passage of the enemy, as watchers on a fog-bound islet might note the ripples on the beach caused by a cruiser’s wake, and their reports, reaching the Ratk strong points years afterward, were helplessly filed with the rest of the growing, but still inadequate, body of information about the enemy. Enough data had accumulated to indicate that the volume of space in which the enemy was operating bordered on the Ratk empire on a front of hundreds of light-years, in fact probably overlapped the empire to some extent—space was too vast, and the suns too many, for the Ratk actually to have occupied, or policed, more than a fraction of the systems within their periphery.
Now, at long last, the enemy would be seen. Dumur stared tensely at the screen.
The relayed picture steadied, resolved. A field of stars—and, almost lost in the midst of the starry blackness, seeming to hang motionless there, the tiny image of a ship, a white globe like a perfect seed pearl lying on black velvet. It had no features visible as yet at the limits of magnification. It was so remote, so insignificant, that the sight of it gave a sense of anticlimax. But it was plainly a ship of a design such as the Ratk had never built.
“It’s real,” said Aglur on a hissing breath. “There’s no more doubt.”
“There was no doubt before!” the Great One said snappishly, “Still, one could hardly help wondering if we’d been deceived by some unknown natural phenomenon, or if—”
“There have been cases where movements of our own ships were erroneously reported as sightings of the enemy. But this time there is no mistake—as even a fool can plainly see. Be quiet and let me think!”
Somehow Dumur found his subordinate more and more insufferable. Silently he promised himself an indulgence: once this was over, supposing both of them survived, he would engage some reliable hired assassins to rid him of Aglur. It was not the correct thing to do, of course; it would sit heavy on his conscience; but one as old and responsibility-laden as Dumur, with so many years of strenuous ser
vice behind him, could surely excuse himself a slight lapse from the competitive code.
His mind, freed by that resolution, came back to the more important decision that confronted him now. It was up to him, as commander on the spot, to choose between two possible tactics—whether to blast the enemy ship at once with heavy weapons in an effort to wreck it and wipe out its crew, or whether to attempt to come to close quarters, risking heavy losses and the possibility that its crew might destroy it with all the information it contained. Information was the chief stake—he could decide to be satisfied with what could be learned from a. shattered and scattered wreck, or he could gamble on the hope of capturing a fairly intact vessel, which might contain charts, data of inestimable value, clues to the enemy’s science, even living crew members who could be questioned.
Dumur stared burningly at the quivering little image on the screen. As yet it yielded him no hint of the procedure he should select, no way of knowing what weapons it might unleash when the Ratk fleet surrounded it. But they would soon find out. Dumur tore himself away from the screen, turned to review his orders for the englobement operation. Consulting the latest recorded data on the enemy’s course, he taped a few minor corrections in the attack plan, for last-minute broadcast when the fleet should break silence and move in.
Piet and Fransi had gone into a sunward observation-turret for a long look at the star ahead. Most of the other colonists—being sensible folk, as colonists should be—had stayed to watch the big screens which, by magnification, actually gave a closer view. But there was something about seeing their home-to-be, knowing that only a bubble of thick glass—and a billion miles or so of airless space—divided them from its reality.
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