The World Swappers

by John Brunner

  “Anty!” someone cried as he opened the door. “Is this list of power requirements complete now?” A paper was thrust under Anty’s nose; he took it and tried to organize his racing thoughts enough to answer the question.

  “Uh–you haven’t taken account of the need to duplicate the alien crew,” he ventured. “And won’t we have to keep our own transfax running continuously to bring stuff in from off-world?”

  The compiler of the list snatched it back. “Don’t need to worry about that; we just keep ours idling and use the power available at the delivery end to get the stuff through. But you’re right about the duplication business, damn it. Anyone got any idea of the mass of one of these Others?”

  “Better allow a hundred kilos,” suggested a girl running a manual computer, not interrupting the play of her fingers over its keyboard.

  “Yes, but how many times over? Damn it, we’ll guess at twenty. If there are more, we can leave it to their imagination to guess that the others died and were buried on Ymir. What’s the average molecular weight of their protoplasm?” he added, trying to set a slide rule and talk at the same time.

  “Bio would know,” the girl answered.

  “I’m going that way,” offered Anty. “I’ll get them to call through with the data.”

  The biochemists were huddled over a heap of cell charts; on a huge wallboard someone had already sketched a tentative mutation for an Ymiran microorganism which might convincingly infect the Others. “Anty!” said one of them as the door opened. “How the hell are we going to get a decent-sized sample of Ymiran germs? There aren’t any culture plants on Ymir.”

  “Well–” Anty fumbled. “Wouldn’t Jaroslav be carrying some of the adaptable ones in his own mucous membranes when he came through?”

  “Anty, you’re a genius,” the speaker replied. “If they can adapt to the warm environment of a human being–and we know some of them can–those are the ones we need to work with. Is Jaroslav coming?”

  “If he doesn’t, he’ll be the only one,” someone replied absently.

  “The technical section wants to know what the average molecular weight of the Others’ protoplasm is,” Anty said. The remark produced a dead silence for fifteen seconds.

  “Average?” echoed a man whose hands were delicately shaping a chromosome-structure analogue out of odd lengths of grooved plastic. “They’re the mathematical wizards; we’ll send them the total and tell them to work out the average themselves.”

  “I guess that’ll do,” Anty agreed.

  In the logistics section, as soon as the door opened to admit Anty, no less than three people yelled for his attention. The logistical question would be the toughest of all; it was no use being able to handle all the individual parts of the job unless they could be handled simultaneously and in the right order.

  “What’s all this about?”

  “Now look, you can’t expect–”

  “There isn’t a hope of–”

  Puzzled at their seeming obtuseness, Anty patiently explained what all this was about, why he did expect, and that there was not only a hope but a certainty of. He left that hut with a slight feeling of bafflement. Now that he had had a chance to think over the details, he was more and more convinced that his inspiration was workable. If he could demolish all the objections to it as easily as those last three, there was no doubt it would come off perfectly.

  Only that again turned on one crucial point. He went to the detector room to check on it.

  Katya Ivanovna was alone in the midst of the glowing signal lights, the quavering dials, the faintly humming apparatus. She did not look up as Anty came quietly in, but she greeted him in a gentle voice.

  “Wait a moment, Anty. I’ve just got to establish this limit beyond question.”

  Obediently, Anty remained silent near the door, looking at the equipment, wondering what it was going to tell them. Katya worked over her calculations, breathing heavily, occasionally muttering a quiet curse as something turned out unfavorably. At length she sighed and sat back in her chair.

  “We can do it, Anty,” she said. “We can really do it. The power experts gave me their estimate five minutes ago, and I’ve just been reading off on the dials. We can pick up that ship about twenty-nine hours from now, and we can keep it for a day and a half at least before we have to put it back where it came from. Assuming nothing goes wrong, of course.”

  She rustled papers together and swung her chair to face him.

  “Congratulations!”

  Anty avoided her gaze. “It doesn’t seem to me that I’ve done anything much,” he muttered, acutely aware of the lack of experience and the youth which he still bore with him.

  “Nothing much, hey? We’ll see. Don’t let it worry you if you get a bit swollen-headed watching us go to work on your brilliant scheme. It’s going to be impressive.” She glanced at her watch. “Suppose we step into the plaza? I think it’s going to begin.”

  “Already?” said Anty, astonished. “But you only just finished your calculations!”

  Katya grinned. “You don’t think Wu would let a little thing like practicability stand in the way, do you? We’ve been ordering people to come here for more than half an hour.”

  Through the windows of the hut, the glare from outside suddenly redoubled in intensity. “There goes the transfax,” Katya said. “Dark glasses, young man–quick, or we’ll miss the start of it.”

  It was spectacular, not merely impressive. The three agents from Wu’s home world of K’ung-fu-tse were the first to arrive. They came straight through the transfax field in rockets, which soared vertically upwards, looped, circled and were already on their way to a landing when the next batch arrived.

  “Verity!” called Katya to a white-haired woman sitting astride a sort of monstrous mechanical horse, which tugged a trailer-load of electrical equipment out of the transfax field. “What the deuce have you got there?”

  “I pinched a complete broadcast power-unit off a new construction project,” Verity called back cheerfully. “I thought it would come in handy.” Catching sight of Anty, she gave a wild wave before lumbering off across the plaza with her vast vehicle.

  After that people and equipment seemed to come in equal quantities. Counce came through from Earth, bringing nothing but his unparalleled experience. Then from Shiva; then from Zeus; then from New Peru; then more from Earth.

  Watching, Anty felt a chill of sheer awe race down his spine. This was the organization to which he belonged to, to which he had given his life. An organization dedicated to a dream and a vision–without rules, except those they imposed on themselves, without any qualification for membership except the desire to serve one’s fellow man.

  Like an army going into battle, they were assembling here from every world occupied by man, but especially from the mother-world of Earth. Those from the colder worlds stopped only to discard their outer clothing as they emerged into the blazing heat of Regis; those from tropical climates did not even waste that much time before going to work.

  First, the transfax units–one to seize the raw plasma out of the sun; another (because the first would be totally destroyed by the fantastic heat) to reach across the parsecs and kidnap the alien ship. That one they sent up to the polar regions. It seemed that it had barely gone from sight before one of the rockets from K’ung-fu-tse took off awkwardly for the weight of a drum of power cable under its starboard wing and began to lay a snakelike thread of it across the landscape. A second followed it. That would be enough to convey the incredible flow of power for the few vital seconds.

  Men and women had scrambled into spacesuits; now the main transfax was temporarily withdrawn from import duty and used to hurl a duplicate of itself, an assembly crew, and the complete broadcast power-unit Verity had brought from Boreas into orbit far overhead. When they seized the plasma from the sun, they would have to use the vacuum of space itself to insulate it, draw off its power on the spot, and broadcast it to ground in a tight beam.

&nbs
p; Power cables spread over the base, like the web of a crazy spider; jury-rigged scaffolding canted upwards, carrying the power unit subassemblies. But there was more going on than could be plainly seen. In one of the huts Jaroslav was being deprived of a colony of involuntary fellow-travelers–germs native to Ymir, which were slapped into cold-culture dishes and used as the basis for the artificial “disease” the Others were to carry home with them. Far to the north, a team of men and women sweated and slaved to prepare the transfax for receiving the ship.

  The sun went down; came up again. It still looked on a frantic hive of activity, but there was order where there had been chaos. Technicians were running preliminary tests now; there was time to snatch a bite to eat and a glass of water. Red-eyed with fatigue, Anty Dreean walked slowly through the midst of it all, wondering at his inspiration become reality.

  “Anty!” said a familiar voice, and he turned to see Counce waving to him. A little shyly, because Counce was a great man, Anty returned the greeting.

  “Good,” Counce said briefly, and made a gesture that took in the entire scene. There was no need to say more; Anty went on his way feeling that he had received an accolade.

  A small group was emerging from Wu’s office: Wu himself, Katya, a woman so beautiful she could only be Falconetta, and a white-haired old man. Katya waved and called to Anty, who hurried across to them. They were engaged in frantic discussion.

  “So you’re Anty Dreean,” said the very beautiful woman, giving him a smile that made him very much aware of his youthful susceptibility. “This is a fine idea you had, but there seems to be one thing you overlooked completely. What are we going to do with the aliens when we’ve got them out of their ship? Leave them to their own devices?”

  “Why–” began Anty, and Katya interrupted.

  “That’s unfair of you, Falconetta! Don’t worry, Anty. We have it in hand. This is Ram Singh, one of our greatest psychologists–the man who’s re-educating the people of Earth single-handed.”

  The old man chuckled. “Trying to, and finding it hard. What we have to do, Anty, is to convince the Others that we intend them no harm. This will call for acting–communication in symbols. I produce television broadcasts, and I know quite a lot about communicating that way. So we shall see what we can do. First, though, we have to get the Others to Regis, and that’s the most important part.”

  He glanced round at Wu, who nodded. “And we’re just about ready to do that now,” he said.

  A technician gave a final check to the power-beam receiver and nodded with satisfaction. The transfax died into inactivity; everywhere men and women started to withdraw to their posts.

  Taking up his hand amplifier, Wu went to the transfax platform and climbed up to survey the scene. Everywhere he looked, men and women signaled readiness. He licked his lips. Anty felt a sudden tightness grip his belly. Now?

  “Now!” said Wu, and his voice boomed through the amplifier. For an age-long instant, nothing seemed to happen; then Anty felt a touch on his arm. It was Falconetta.

  “Look up there!” she said, pointing, and he looked. Overhead, so bright that it shone through the blue sky like a new star, gleamed a point of light: sun-stuff, ripped by men from its home to serve them in their hour of desperate need.

  CHAPTER XIII

  The whole gigantic task, which had taken so many people so many hours to plan, lasted less than a fraction of a second.

  First, they stole the plasma from the sun; the transfax which had seized it boiled instantly into nothing, or rather into insignificant, contaminating gases. They were ready to trap it in insubstantial but invulnerable bands of magnetic force, a tiny star from which they could drain the power they wanted.

  This power they flashed to the ground below, in a beam so tight even the air through which it passed barely diminished its intensity. A receiver stood the shock for moments only, feeding the power into the cables which had been laid at rocket-speed across the face of the planet. The metal skeleton of the receiver glowed, burned although it was made of steel, stood out on the retinas of the watchers in vivid silhouette-like afterimages.

  The cables burned too, sizzling across the horizon like a twofold train of gunpowder ignited with a match. Black oily smoke from the insulation drifted lazily in the light wind after the current had passed.

  And in the cold arctic night, a group of silent people saw materialized before their eyes a ship that had not been built by human hands.

  They had not calculated exactly right; the mass of the vessel was too great, and instead of dropping to rest on the area prepared for it, it sprawled across the transfax platform and crushed it to smithereens. There would be another ready by the time they had to send the vessel back. No one had time to worry about such small points as these; the main thing, the only thing, was that their incredible gamble had paid off.

  For a long moment there was no reaction; then the tension dissolved into jubilation, and they clapped one another on the back and laughed out of sheer relief. Someone remembered to radio Main Base with the good news, and warn them that the transfax receiver up here was smashed.

  When Wu received the message, he clambered down from the platform and gave Anty a thoughtful look. “Well, I warned you,” he said. “It’s gone off perfectly so far.”

  “What’s this about?” demanded Falconetta, and Wu wryly repeated the warning he had earlier given to Anty.

  “I don’t think Saïd finds his work unpleasant,” Falconetta commented. “But I’ll ask him sometime. Anty, is there any way of getting up to the north now the transfax is out there?”

  “I’ll check,” said Anty obligingly, automatically dropping back into his accustomed role of newest recruit and errand boy. When he had hurried off, Ram Singh raised one fine white eyebrow at his companion.

  “You had a reason for that,” he said. “You know perfectly well that whether or not the transfax is functioning at the polar base we can still be sent there with a little extra power. If Anty had thought for a moment or two, he would have seen that fact himself.”

  Falconetta did not reply directly; instead, she looked at Wu. “That’s a nice boy you have there, Wu,” she said. “Why are you being unkind to him? Is it because you’re jealous?”

  “Jealous? I suppose I am. I haven’t tried to do more than give him a fair appraisal of the problems facing him, though.”

  “If he’s as capable as he seems, he’ll figure them out for himself.” Falconetta turned her smoky-yellow eyes speculatively after Anty. “He reminds me more than a little of myself, when I was new. He is an original, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, that’s his born self.”

  Anty was returning, and called out when he was still a dozen paces distant. “They’re warming up the transfax now for us to get to the northern base. They’re passing out protective clothing at the stores hut; I think we’d better get some and go right away.”

  A few minutes later they walked through onto the bare, frosty ground, and saw the alien ship lying like a stranded whale under the harsh floodlights. They were only a short distance from the site of the excavation that had revealed the traces of the Others’ first visit to Regis, and Anty found himself contrasting the circumstances of the two ships’ arrivals. What would the reaction be of the inhuman minds in that enigmatic, almost featureless hull? What were they thinking? Had they any idea where they were? Perhaps they could tell from the star patterns, if the first ship that called here had made a record of them and passed it on.

  They waited while Wu made a circuit of the perimeter. A battery of floodlights illumined each side of the ship, concentrating on the barely visible outline of the air-locks. The vessel itself was not unlike a human ship; after all, it was built to the same physical laws, driven by similar methods–there had to be some identity. Yet there was a difference, and Anty found his pulse quickening as it had done when he dug up the alien-made cathode-ray tube from the permafrozen ground.

  Now, at last, the long-awaited moment of contact betw
een the races was at hand. And thanks to his own idea, it was man who would dictate the circumstances. Ironical, that when they had devoted so much work to the cause they believed in–that man and alien should live in peace–when it came to this point they did not dare trust the aliens to act of their own accord.

  Ram and Falconetta were discussing in low tones their project for making their peaceful intentions known to the Others. Anty wanted desperately to eavesdrop, but respected their obviously deliberate whispering.

  Satisfied, Wu returned from his tour. “Well?” he said, addressing Ram. “Made your mind up?”

  The old man inclined his white head. “I think so,” he answered. “We are agreed that it will be best to wait for some action by the aliens before we ourselves make any move. They will require some time to adjust to what has happened.”

  “As you will,” conceded Wu. “In that case, I’ll reduce the watch to a rota, and give people a chance to go back to Main Base and rest and relax.”

  He glanced at Anty. “How about you? You must be pretty well exhausted by now.”

  “I think I’d prefer to stay and see what happens,” Anty ventured.

  “I think he deserves to,” Falconetta put in, and Wu, after an instant’s hesitation, nodded and walked away.

  But nothing did happen, Nothing at all.

  As the hours ticked away, the biochemists began to worry about their carefully prepared cultures; the technicians began to wonder whether they would have time enough to duplicate the crew and plant the dummies aboard the ship, the men and women in the logistics section worried about getting the alien supplies out of the ship to provision the real crew members while they were stranded here on Regis. And Katya, in the detector hut back at Main Base, watched the line indicating the limit of their available power converge on the line indicating the theoretical course of the ship.