The World Swappers

by John Brunner

  “I found her, Dr. Gold,” Dolores said. “Right near the ship she came on. She’s all yours.”

  Gold nodded, thrusting back his chair to get to his feet. “Thank you, Miss Lourenço. Sit down, please, young woman.”

  Startled, Enni glanced from the doctor to Dolores. “What–what’s going on?” she faltered.

  Dolores shrugged. “I only do as I’m told,” she said. “I wouldn’t know.” Her face had lost its sympathetic expression, and now seemed quite hard and masklike. Enni felt an empty sensation of betrayal. She could not find her voice.

  For a moment, Dolores’ face softened again. “Good luck, kid, anyway. Don’t be hard on her, will you, Doc?” she added over her shoulder, and then she was gone from the room.

  “Sit down, please,” Gold repeated. Enni took a deep breath.

  “No. Not until you tell me what’s going on!”

  “You will do as you’re told,” said Gold bluntly. “You must understand that you are not very important.”

  Enni, biting her lip, shook her head in dismay rather than refusal. “Very well,” said Gold heavily, and pressed a knob on his desk. A door opposite the one by which Enni had entered slid aside, and more men, also in white coveralls, came in quietly. They moved toward Enni.

  She screamed.

  It was not long before she discovered that the tales the elders told about Earth were a mere fraction of the truth. With hypnotics and suggestion-drugs, they opened her mind, took possession of it, drained it of her most secret memories. They recorded her words and her screams and played them back until there was no corner of her brain to which she could flee for even an instant’s privacy.

  It seemed to go on for a long time. It seemed to go on forever.

  Falconetta’s house was built on the edge of the Indian Ocean–literally. At high tide, the sea flowed over the transparent ceiling of the main room. It was high tide now, and Falconetta and Ram Singh waited tensely in greenish luminescence. They hardly spoke. Every now and again they betrayed their impatience by gestures.

  When at length the transfax alarm sounded, they started in spite of themselves. Falconetta leaped to her feet and went to open the concealed door of the cabinet. They always hid their transfax units; they had to. Strangers might otherwise have asked questions.

  Counce came out into the room and answered their unspoken question with a nod.

  “He’s got her. And they’ve probably already gone to work. Now we’ve got to figure out how long we can leave her in his hands.”

  “As short a time as possible,” said Falconetta firmly.

  “But long enough for him to convince himself he’s taken everything he can from her mind,” Ram corrected.

  Counce gave a shrug. “Two weeks should be quite long enough. After that, when Bassett finds out he still hasn’t got what he wanted, he may grow desperate and permanently injure the girl’s mind. And if we let that happen, we’d never forgive ourselves.”

  “Have you decided yet how we’re going to rescue her?” Falconetta inquired.

  “Just grab her. By transfax.”

  “And make it obvious that we had a hand in it?” Ram objected. “After all, Bassett would recognize that a matter transmitter had been used.”

  “That’s all to the good. When Bassett realizes that we are in such a strong position that we can give him information he thought would suffice, and he finds he has been hitting his head against a brick wall of our design, he’s that much more likely to give way in sheer fury.”

  Ram hesitated. “It sounds logical,” he conceded. “All right, we can try. We can only do our best, after all, and we’re certainly doing that.”

  “I’d feel a hell of a sight more confident if we weren’t already doing our best,” snapped Counce. He dropped into a relaxer which stood close by, and wiped his hand across his eyes as though to rub away tiredness.

  “I hate this blackmail,” he said. “That’s what it is, you know. With an admixture of bribery. Still, it’s all we’ve got.”

  “I think you can dignify our contribution with a better name,” Ram said gently. “Have you had a chance to watch the Falconetta Show lately?”

  “No, but I expect that, as usual, half the population of Earth has been tuning in. What are you doing?”

  “A series on the effects of intolerance in the history of pre-space Earth. There’s a fad for the period at present. We contrast such affairs as the apartheid situation in Africa and the persecution of the Australian aborigines with the advantages of co-operation. We shall climax with a hypothetical program regarding contact with intelligent aliens.”

  “It sounds valuable.” Counce displayed sudden interest.

  “For what it’s worth,” Falconetta qualified cynically. “We have the biggest audience on Earth, but we still only have it an hour a week, and the rest of the time the public is being fed the standard complacent pap. Damn it, Saïd, I sometimes think we could give people the transfax and they would just put it in the corner with a dust-cover over it and bury their heads again. How the hell are we going to make people fit to live with intelligent aliens if they are still prepared to dislike human beings just because they were born under a different sun?”

  “We’re trying,” Counce said wearily. “We are trying.”

  “But there remains the risk,” Ram pointed out, “that even if we succeed in making our race fit to live with the Others, the Others may not be fit to live with us.”

  There were plans to deal with that, too; they thought in silence about the results of delivering fusion bombs by transfax into every major alien city.

  The transfax alarm interrupted the pause. Counce opened the cabinet and found a single sheet of paper on its floor. He scanned it without expression.

  “Do you remember we were discussing the most disastrous things that could happen to us?” he said at last. “Ram, you recall what you said?”

  The old man nodded, clenching his thin hands to stop them from trembling.

  “Well, it’s happened. This is from Wu, on Regis. They’ve detected an alien ship. And it’s been to Ymir. They haven’t heard from Jaroslav, but there isn’t any room for doubt.

  “We’ve been discovered, and all the careful work we’ve been doing to prepare for the event is still unfinished.”

  He sounded as if he was pronouncing an epitaph on mankind. He felt that quite possibly he was.

  CHAPTER XI

  The course was a true geodesic of the continuum–a straight line in the sense of being the actual shortest distance between two points–and that was suspicious in itself. For it implied the ship’s crew knew what they were going to find.

  Usually, a long voyage of exploration took the form of a series of dog-legs, from system to system; this one had bypassed half a dozen ostensibly promising stars, arrowing direct for Ymir’s own sun.

  The Others knew something.

  Because of the lapse of time involved in the propagation of the betraying “wake” of a hyperphotonic vessel, the watchers on Regis did not know what was happening until the alien craft had already been to Ymir. It had spent a few days in the neighborhood–by a convenient miracle, at a time when no human-built space-ships were scheduled to call. It was a bare outside chance, then, that the Others might have the impression they had chanced across an indigenous life-form, rather than a colony planted from elsewhere. If they had observed reasonably closely during their brief stay, however, the chance would have diminished to vanishing point. It was not worth banking on.

  Like it or not, they had to recognize that the human race’s one advantage over the Others–that they knew of their competitors’ existence–had been canceled out.

  The news was broached by Katya Ivanovna, on duty in the ever-watchful detector room, where by turns every individual on Regis calculated, identified, and plotted the course of ships in space, both human and alien. Katya was that much faster than most of the group at reducing the pattern of the vibrations in the cosmos to a line on a three-dimensional graph.
This time, she wasted the small advantage in checking her calculations for error, hoping against hope she might be wrong.

  But the figures she gave to Wu left no room for doubt.

  For a long time the director of the expedition sat silent at his desk, contemplating the neat handwritten symbols before him. At length he pushed his chair back and stood up.

  “Well, we’re on the downgrade now,” he said. “So far as I can see at the moment, there’s not a thing we can do. But we’ll scrape the barrel for ideas just in case. Pass this news to everybody. Tell them to drop what they’re doing and come here at once. Maybe someone will think of something.”

  “And if they don’t?” Katya sounded as though she knew the answer to that; Wu gave it to her regardless.

  “Then I guess we just have to blow them to bits.”

  He crossed the room to the master public-address panel and leaned his thumb heavily on the activating switch.

  “Drop what you’re doing, everybody, and come out into the plaza. The Others appear to have discovered Ymir. Somehow we’ve got to figure out a way of getting around this.”

  It was a dispirited group that assembled on the hard-beaten sand of the plaza. Regis Main Base consisted of a haphazard arrangement of huts surrounding the heavy-duty transfax which was capable of handling practically any mass or size that might conceivably be required. They had chosen this spot for their base because it never rained, very seldom clouded over to interfere with local visual observation. The choice had drawbacks; one was that the heat was usually scorching around noon. People sweated and blinked their eyes as they waited for Wu to climb on the transfax platform and address them.

  Miserably, Anty Dreean watched the director’s compact figure rise to the impromptu dais, straighten, and look around. What the hell could be done? They might as well throw their hands in and go home–if they had any homes to go to. Once you accepted the responsibility of the knowledge the group guarded, though, the group became your family. It had to. The risks were too great otherwise.

  Now Wu picked up a hand amplifier and started to speak.

  “We’ve detected the wake of an alien ship,” he said baldly. “It apparently went straight from one of the Others’ local bases to the Ymiran system. It spent a short time in scouting around. Now it’s heading directly back the way it came. There’s no room for doubt that we’ve been discovered; from what we know of the Others’ preferences in regard to climate and atmosphere, they will automatically have decided we represent a serious rival to their ambitions. Ymir has always been a major threat in two respects: first, it is the nearest of the human-inhabited worlds, except for Regis, to the Others’ sphere of activity; second, it is the only human-inhabited world which the Others could comfortably occupy.

  “So far, presumably, none of the aliens except those actually aboard the scouting vessel are aware of our existence. I’ve seen figures on the ship’s course. It is now about one day out from Ymir, and six to seven days from its home base. It will pass closest to Regis about two and a quarter days from now. We could transfax a bomb over such a distance and destroy it and the knowledge it carries.

  “Only the fact that it went straight from its base to Ymir suggests that the Others deduced the existence of a planet suitable for their race in that system. If their ship simply disappears without trace, they will send another; if they lose that too, they are probably sufficiently like ourselves in their patterns of thought to suspect deliberate interference. This problem presents the toughest enigma I can recall. We have less than two days in which to solve it some other way than by destroying the ship. Have you any suggestions?”

  He looked around the gathering. He saw only down-cast eyes, blank, worried expressions. The gloom was tangible, almost; everyone reflected that the aims they had given their lives to now stood in immediate danger of annihilation.

  Anty Dreean felt perhaps the most miserable of all. He had not yet managed to grow accustomed to seeing his cherished intentions founder on a rock of hard fact. Like everyone else engaged in the vast plan–the plan to ensure that man and alien should profit and not suffer from their impending contact–he had given up everything to this single end. Failure was not simple failure; it was ultimate disaster.

  Wu was speaking again. “We don’t have to have a complete solution. A stopgap, first. You know that we are in sight of success if only we can have enough time. Saïd Counce is achieving wonders with his attempts to influence Bassett; Jaroslav Dubin is laying the foundation for implementing our plans on Ymir. If we can stave off contact for a few years more, we shall be able to risk cutting corners. At the moment, we daren’t. Unless someone can suggest a means of gaining time, we shall be forced to sacrifice our entire hopes.”

  To his own complete astonishment, Anty Dreean found that he had an idea. He looked covertly round at his neighbors; their faces were as blank as before. He looked beyond, feeling afraid to speak out at once in case someone forestalled him with a better plan. No one spoke, and Wu shrugged and started to get down from the platform.

  “Dr. Wu!” said Anty. “Just a moment, please.”

  Wu paused and looked round. “Yes, Anty?” he said. He didn’t sound hopeful.

  “We don’t have to destroy the ship, you know,” Anty ventured, and people everywhere in the plaza turned and looked at him. Self-consciously, he plunged ahead.

  “We could kidnap it, couldn’t we? And fake it to look as if the crew caught some dangerous disease on this planet they visited? After all, the people at their base don’t know they didn’t actually land on Ymir.”

  Wu gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “Anty, it just might be done. Someone give me a breakdown on power requirements.”

  “Fantastic!” snapped an anonymous voice from near the transfax platform. “You mean reach out across–what is it, eight parsecs?–and grab a large ship in full flight, and haul it clear back to Regis? It’d take ten to the tenth ergs per gram, or something like that. Ridiculous!”

  “Not at all,” contradicted someone else. “What we do is help ourselves to a hundred cubic yards of raw plasma out of the local sun, bottle it in a force field, and use that as a power source.”

  “Is that practical?” Wu glanced at the speaker.

  “No. But it could be done if we had to do it,” the man answered cynically.

  Ideas bubbled up now like a hot spring through broken rocks; arguments started at a dozen points in the plaza as to the feasibility of the idea. Slide rules and calculators were already being applied to the mathematical questions involved.

  “Dr. Wu,” someone called out. “What exactly do we do with the ship once we’ve got it?” That same question must have been in a hundred minds, for there was a chorus of agreement.

  “Anty?” said Wu, looking down. “Could you enlarge on that point?”

  “I was thinking we could bring the ship down near the pole, where the Others landed before. Then we could get the crew out and make non-living duplicates of them, and fill them full of some mutated culture of a native Ymiran microorganism.”

  “Could we do it in time?” objected yet another voice, and a chorus from a group of biochemists assured him they would do their damnedest.

  “That’s all very fine and large! That means we have to put the ship right back on its original course afterwards, with its dummy crew of corpses,” the same voice snapped; and the technicians who had furiously been calculating power requirements immediately doubled their original estimates and frowned over the result.

  “All right! All right!” Wu shouted into his hand amplifier; silence fell like tropical night. “We’ll have to look into this in detail. Break it up and get on with it. The moment the ship comes within range, we want to seize it and ’fax it here to Regis. We have to deal with the crew before the ship theoretically gets out of range again, so that we can put it back where it would have got to if we hadn’t interfered. You’ve got one hour to tell me whether or not it can be done!”

  The group dispersed quickly, l
eaving Anty Dreean standing rather foolishly by himself twenty paces from the transfax platform. Wu set down his hand amplifier and looked the young man up and down.

  “Thank you, Anty,” he said in a voice that barely carried across the gap. “I think you’ve solved it.”

  Anty tried to appear modest. He felt completely overwhelmed.

  “If it can be made to work,” Wu continued, “you realize what it means, don’t you?”

  “A breathing space,” said Anty, puzzled.

  “I mean for yourself.” Wu was measuring his words. “It means that we shall really have to start taking notice of you, Anty. It looks to me as though you’ve got what Saïd Counce has–the talent we need most desperately. The ability to stand a problem on its head, so that it loses its difficulty. It isn’t a conscious talent. It’s just a gift. I thought it would be better to warn you. Because if you have got it, your life is going to be hell from here on out, with people pestering you night and day to give them the answers they can’t get themselves. You’d better have a talk with Saïd, young man, and let him warn you himself.”

  He got down from the platform and walked across to where Anty stood. “You’ll get the dirtiest jobs of all, Anty. I can only hope you’ll enjoy it.”

  The director’s seriousness made Anty uncomfortable. He said, “Well, we don’t know yet if it’ll work or not. What can I do towards finding out? Everyone seems to be working on something.”

  “Go and poke your nose in,” said Wu. “I mean it. Just go and poke your nose in. Find out why people think it won’t work, and tell them why it will. Damn it, it’s your plan! You go make it work!”

  CHAPTER XII

  A little timidly, Anty obeyed. Wu, with a parting nod, more perhaps of commiseration than commendation, had turned his back and walked away across the plaza to his own office. At random, Anty cast around for a place to begin; he chose a hut which proved to be full of a babel of shouted calculations.