They stood for a time in silence, arms about one another, looking out at the immense star-powdered dark and the one light that burned far brighter than the rest and seemed to brighten still more as they gazed.
“It looks familiar,” said Fransi in a hushed voice. “Sun-colored. Just like our own sun, back home.”
She didn’t mean the sun of Earth, of course; both she and Piet had been born on a third-stage colonial planet, and now they were about to become fourth-stage colonists. They had never met before the expedition began—a fact which sometimes struck them as incredible, now.
Piet said, yielding to the irresistible informative urge of the male, “Of course it’s sun-colored, or we wouldn’t be going there. If the calculations are right, there should be at least one planet where we and our children can live under natural conditions. You mustn’t think ‘back home’ any more. That’s home now, up ahead.”
“Yes . . . the rest of our lives—”
Piet eyed her sidelong, gauging the solemnity of her expression, then cut her mood short by circling her waist with his hands and swinging her off the floor. As she squeaked protest, he growled in mock surprise, “You know, woman, you’ve lost a lot of weight since I married you!”
“I haven’t!” Fransi denied breathlessly.
“ ‘Struth. You’re wasting away to nothing. When the captain married us at peak of flight, you’d have tipped a normal set of scales at better than a quintillion tons.”
“It didn’t show.” Fransi looked down at her trim figure with a touch of complacency.
“Not subjectively, of course. Women—always subjective. Likewise, by the rest of the Universe’s objective time, we’ve been married about a hundred years, so we ought to be celebrating our plutonium anniversary or something.”
“Remarks like that should be grounds for divorce.”
“Ah, but there’s where I have you in my clutches. You forgot that ship captains can perform weddings, but they can’t grant divorces.”
“Trapped!” sighed Fransi happily.
They kissed, the stars forgotten.
Piet half turned to gaze once more at the sun ahead. He began soberly, “Whatever happens—” and hesitated.
“Whatever—?”
“I was only going to say—whatever happens to us now, it’s been worth it.” Piet took a deep breath and went on, a little too positively: “It’s highly unlikely there are any serious dangers waiting for us. With a new world you can never be sure, of course, but don’t worry, darling, some day we’ll be revered Old Settlers, boring our grandchildren with our stories of the First Landing. Now, do you want to press your nose against the window and admire the new homestead some more, or shall we wander back to the others?”
“Let’s wander,” said Fransi quietly. “Maybe they’ve brought the planets onto the screens by now.”
They made their way back to one of the common rooms near the great globe’s center. Here the prospective colonists were assembled, watching the vision screen and listening avidly to the occasional comments that came through the speakers from the active crew in the central control room.
Neither Piet, as a psycho technician in charge of the colonizing expedition’s mental well-being, nor Fransi in her vocation of nutritional expert, had any assigned tasks in connection with the approach and landing. They sat down unobtrusively among the rest.
On the big screen the image of a planet flashed into being, swelling as the focus was improved and the magnification stepped up. It was a mottled blue-green globe, with whitish patches that might be either clouds or deserts.
“That looks promising,” said Piet softly. “If it’s not too close to the sun, or too far—”
Fransi stole a look round. The colonists’ faces reflected wonder, anxiety, impatience—but mostly hope. Lovers clasped hands and drank in wide-eyed their first glimpse of the world to which all their dreams might henceforward be anchored. A woman held a child aloft and crooned to it urgently, “Look, look.’ ”
A voice boomed from the speakers; they recognized the deep tones of Captain Thom himself, saying matter-of-factly but with a note of repressed excitement: “You are now viewing the second planet. Diameter seven thousand miles, distance from sun about 1.2 astronomical units. Period of rotation not yet determined, but we’ll have an estimate shortly. Evidences of water and vegetation—” The captain broke off with peculiar abruptness; from the speaker came indistinct mutterings of a colloquy in the control room. Piet pricked up his ears in a futile effort to catch what was said.
Fransi was listening to the murmur of conversation among the colonists.
“. . . Almost exactly as they say Earth—”
“Looks as if we’re the lucky ones. We’ll live off the fat of the land!”
“There will be plenty of hard work on that land—”
“I know, but—”
The speaker rumbled—the captain’s voice again: “Attention, everybody. Th,e astronomers have just spotted certain features on the second planet which may be signs of intelligent life. Making more observations now; we’ll let you know what develops.”
Piet’s forehead creased in a vertical frown. He stood up, said irresolutely, “Perhaps I’d better go in there. There may be work for me, after all.”
“Oh! Must you?”
“If you’ve studied your Handbook like a good girl,” he said with forced levity, “you know what this may mean.”
Fransi nodded unhappily. If the observations showed that the planet was already inhabited, the ship would be maneuvered into an orbit to wait while scouting expeditions probed cautiously, taking the measure of the natives, their level of achievement and the aspects of their culture which would be vital to future relations between them and humanity. Such encounters with other intelligent races had taken place three times before in the history they knew of; in each case, a modus vivendi had eventually been worked out. That was one of the eventualities for which psychotechnicians like Piet were supposed to be prepared. But if there was intelligent life here, it would mean an end to the dream of pioneering a virginal new world.
“It’s the number two possibility that has me bothered.” Piet’s frown was worried. Suppose this is the time we make contact with the Others.”
The Others—Fransi knew about that, too: the other race which had, like man, reached the stage of interstellar flight and begun to expand through the galaxy from some unknown point of origin; the Others of whose existence men had known for a thousand years, but whom they had never yet seen face to face.
Piet’s brooding, expression reflected the somberness of his thoughts as he envisioned the responsibility which, if the signs of life reported should signify the presence of those Others, would rest in large part upon his own youthful shoulders. The tardiness of interstellar communications would permit no shifting of that burden—the fearful responsibility of representing the race of man in its first contact with an alien species whose attainments equaled or perhaps excelled its own. On all psychotechnicians who went out with the interstellar ships, the possibility that they might have to play that part was firmly impressed in their training; but Piet fervently hoped it would not fall to his lot.
“Attention!” roared the speaker jarringly. “Prepare for zero gravity! Repeat—grab hold of something! Zero gravity in fifteen seconds!” The voice faltered, and the harsh sound of indrawn breath came clearly through. The people in the big room stared wildly at one another’s suddenly white faces, shocked, uncomprehending. The speaker rasped, “We are about to take evasive action. Ships of unfamiliar type are converging on our course from several directions. Prepare for zero—”
Suddenly, sickeningly, they were weightless, as the gravitic drive field was stepped up to full neutralization to give the huge vessel its poor maximum of maneuverability. The colonists clung to the furnishings; most of them were speechless, but somewhere a voice whimpered hysterical fright. They felt infinitesimal tremors and lurches as the ship began to swerve and veer. The speakers h
ad fallen silent.
Piet hesitated, decided against trying to make it to the control room. There could be little time; the evasive attempt was hopeless, if only because the remaining dregs of the fuel supply would not suffice to build up interstellar velocity again. If the attackers were merely bent on destroying the ship, this was the finish; otherwise—In any case, he could try to keep the people from panicking.
Even as he opened his mouth to speak, the ship rocked and rang. Voices cried out in fear and threatened to become an uproar.
Piet called out, desperately striving to sound calm and self-possessed: “Hang on, folks. That was probably a warning; whoever it is must at least be curious enough to board us. Remember what your Handbook says about meeting aliens—”
Another near miss made the ship shiver in every member. It was followed swiftly by a prolonged grinding, shuddering roar, as some vast mass collided with the outer hull and rolled or slid grappling along it.
Piet edged over to throw a futilely protecting arm around Fransi. He shouted above the rising tumult, “Everybody, listen! We’re about to meet aliens. Their reaction to our arrival shows that they’re violently suspicious of our intentions. We can’t fight them and we can’t run. Our chance, our only chance, is to show them we’re peaceful. Everything we do must point to that—”
From the outer hull began a series of explosions, vibrating thunderously through all the great vessel, soul-chilling in their purposefully spaced repetition.
“They’re blasting their way in!” a man bellowed. “Where are the guns?”
Piet, face bloodless, barked, “You’re better off without them. Guns wouldn’t help—”
“Help!” a woman’s scream echoed him. “Somebody help! They’re about to start killing, killing—”
The Great Ratk Dumur demanded expressionlessly, “It is done?”
“Yes,” said the Second Greatest. “All of them have been removed from their ship, stripped of everything which might possibly be a weapon, and placed under close guard. The ship itself is still being searched minutely; but it appears to be quite safe.”
“Good,” said Dumur, but inwardly he tasted the sour juices of self-contempt. He had tried in vain to summon up the courage to board the captured vessel in person, but his conviction that the whole thing was too easy, that the enemy must have laid some profound snare for the unwary, had been too much for him. He had sent Aglur instead, half-hoping that the enemy ship would blow itself to atoms with Aglur aboard; but the Second had gone and returned safely and—it seemed to Dumur—clothed in a new and augmented insolence.
“Shall I tell them to proceed with the mind-probing?”
The scheming devil had even taken the Great One’s next order out of his mouth. “Yes,” said Dumur with difficulty. “Tell them to begin. I will come down presently to direct the interrogation myself.”
When the Second Greatest had 122 gone, Dumur sat glumly amid the untidy jumble of unfiled recording tapes, documents, and rubbish which littered his private office here on the second planet. The place had not been cleaned since the Great One had become convinced that the servant whose duty it was to do so was in Aglur’s pay.
He picked up a sealed canister of his favorite ichor, opened it, and was about to quaff it when he bethought him that Aglur had stood all too near it and he was not sure he had kept all of Aglur’s tentacles in sight. There were such things as hollow needles capable of introducing poison into a container without noticeable sign. He set the canister carefully aside to be analyzed—it might yield useful clues as to Aglur’s methods—and, wheezing wearily, slewed around on his sucker-feet to fumble for the button which would fetch a fresh supply of ichor untouched from the stores. Aglur could not have suborned all the inspectors of the quartermaster division—or could he?
The Great Ratk brooded. Was he growing old? It seemed to him that when he had been younger—at any rate before his first mating had really taught him the meaning of pain and hatred—he had worried much less, had lived dangerously and liked it as a true Ratk should, considering danger even as the spice of life. Then, of course, he had been much lower in rank, in a position where relatively few would profit from his death. It was some consolation to realize that Aglur had his troubles too; there were plenty of ambitious ones below him who wouldn’t mind bettering themselves. But a Great Ratk, at the pinnacle of success, was fair game for anyone. The advantages his position gave him in safeguarding himself were more than nullified by the fact that he was the sole individual whose disappearance would benefit everyone in the military hierarchy.
With an effort Dumur wrenched his attention away from those everpresent gnawing thoughts, back to the business in hand. The interception of the enemy ship had gone off like clockwork—with an ease, in fact, that made him uneasy. It did not seem possible that the enemy, whose awesome shadow had lain across the Ratk empire for a thousand years, could be so lightly met and overcome. They must have something. Some hidden weapon, some secret powers—But the mind-probes would force them into the open; the mind-probes would tell the complete story.
A wealth of valuable information could be expected from the examination of the ship, its equipment, its records—so seemingly unready for attack had the enemy been that even star-charts giving the location of some of his installations were among the captured material! But even this treasure would be insignificant beside what might be uncovered in the minds of the prisoners—not only their scientific knowledge, but their racial mentality, cultural attitudes, innate characteristics, which in the possession of trained experts in psychological warfare might become decisive keys to the ultimate destruction of all their kind by the Ratk.
Sighing, Dumur pressed the button which would summon guards to escort him to the interrogation chambers. He was still nervous at the thought of confronting the prisoners—who knew what they might still have up their sleeves—but it was high time he was putting in an appearance. Aglur, curse him, would be there now, very much on the spot, building his prestige with others who might be induced to aid his plotting.
The strain was telling sorely on him, the Great One realized as he waited for his guards. Sometimes of late, when Aglur was present, he feared that his self-control would snap and he would seize a weapon and kill his rival; that, of course, would be a crime of violence, punishable by disgrace and death. Better, much better—since Dumur was too busy to work out elaborate schemes of poisoning—to hire assassins; the idea was degrading, but there were plenty of Ratk of the baser sort who would commit violence for a fee, leaving the Great One’s own tentacles technically clean. And then he would be able to rest easily again—well, more easily, perhaps. There would always be another Second Greatest.
They prodded Piet out once more into the room of droning sounds that seemed to bore into your skull, of flashing lights that penetrated through the eyes and seemed to reflect from countless splintered mirrors inside your head. The partially incomprehensible machines that produced these effects, and that had yet subtler intangible fingers to pick your brain apart neuron by neuron, were there as before with their betentacled operators; but a new personage was present, a pouchy-looking monster flanked by armed guards, with some sort of insignia of rank on the complicated harness it wore.
Piet twisted his head round painfully to see what other prisoners had been brought out. His heart turned over as he saw Fransi there among three of the other colonists. All of them were in the same condition he knew himself to be—haggard, tattered, and dirty, bathed in perspiration in the hot steamy atmosphere their captors evidently preferred.
Fransi’s eyes met his, and her lips shaped inaudible words. Piet couldn’t be quite sure, but he thought they said, Whatever happens—
A mechanical voice, whose inflections shifted erratically as it picked words and phrases from a record-bank where they had been stored at the previous examination, said loudly: “Do you understand what you are hearing?”
Piet looked up stonily. “Yes.”
“You will answ
er the Great Ratk.”
Piet took that as a command, said nothing, staring at the sagging manyfooted monster with the insignia. It gazed back at him with huge eyes that despite their alienness seemed to him to burn with a fire of unreasoning hate.
The Great Ratk made croaking sounds, and the interpreting machine translated them: “What was your purpose in coming here?”
Piet straightened his aching body. He felt physically drained by the steam-bath of the Ratk prison cells, and mentally battered by his session with the probe-machines and by the manifest hopelessness of the situation. He remembered how Captain Thorn had died—in a brief futile battle for the control room when the Ratk had swarmed aboard—and he wondered briefly if the captain had been right.
He said, “We come in peace, as I’ve tried to explain before.” The translating machine rendered his words into the croaking of Ratk speech. “We hoped to establish a permanent colony on one or more of the planets of this star. We didn’t know that it had already been occupied by you Others. But we were and are still prepared to come to terms with you on any basis agreeable to both. It is our belief that there is plenty of room in the Universe—especially since it appears that your kind is native to a Class A sun and naturally desires to colonize similar systems, whereas we are interested in Class G stars—”
“What is the part of occupation of this sun in your overall plan?”
“There is no overall plan. We are simply a colonizing expedition. You have seen for yourselves that we carried no heavy weapons, that our cargo was of agricultural and construction tools, seeds, animal embryos, fertilizers. We believe that intelligent races can always work out a basis for coexistence—”
“Repetition is waste of time.” The Ratk’s great eyes swiveled; it singled our Fransi with a pointing tentacle. “You. Speak now.”
“What do you creatures want?” quavered the girl. “You’ve never met us before. We’ve done nothing to you. We’ve come without hostile intentions—”
“Repetion is a waste of time,” droned the talking machine again.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 58