“I wish I could get away with the things Doc Gibbs does,” he said. “Doc is worth his weight in champagne at a party but he thumbs his nose at Kendrick’s by staying away.”
“You can—when you get to a position like Gibbs. That’s the privilege of rank, thumbing your nose at men like Kendricks. Until then you have to be nice at stupid parties. _That’s_ Navy.”
“It’s not Nancy Baird,” said Glenn seriously. “You didn’t talk like that before you came to Pacific Base.”
“I told you I had learned more Navy in three months than you had, in ten years.”
Glenn got in the car beside her. His resentment against her unnatural cynicism mingled with the little raging fires that Kendrick’s could so carefully ignite within him. But, as he drove away, these both succumbed to the immense and secret pleasure that came with anticipation of the job ahead.
It was for this and almost for this alone that he had come to Pacific Base. When word of transfer had come his exultation had not been for getting Nancy home, not for getting Jimmy to a civilized school—at least not in the first few hundredths of a second.
Even on Moon Base they had talked of the frantic work going on at Pacific to acquire a Fourth Order drive. The theoretical physicists had proven beyond doubt that Fourth Order was feasible but they couldn’t tell the engineers how to build one.
But somewhere in the immensity of the Universe there would inevitably be a race who knew Fourth Order drives. It fired an imagination and a yearning Glenn could not ignore. The one place at which it might be contacted would be Pacific Base. For that hope he had come. For that single hope he would stay—and take anything that Kendricks could dish out. Kendricks and his son-in-law, Lieutenant Prentiss, whom Central had by-passed in picking Glenn.
He took the beach road. Although it was heavy with traffic even at this time of night it was the shortest route to the great naval base five miles away. There, as Chief of Technical Operations, Glenn would direct the berthing and accommodations of this stranger from far worlds—and direct negotiations for technical exchanges.
To walk through a hull fabricated a hundred-million light years away, to touch its machinery, to put tools to it, to set it functioning again—that was worth all the indignities Kendricks and military fops like him could throw in his way.
“I’ll probably be the rest of the night,” he said to Nancy. “You take the car on home. I’ll give you a call in the morning and let you know what’s next.”
“Oh, no! The last time something like this happened you didn’t show up for three days. I’m staying right with you until you get things organized.
Then we’re going home and get some sleep.”
He looked out over the sea where breakers rolled slowly under the white moon, their white caps frantically unravelling. Then he sucked in his breath sharply and pulled the car over to the shoulder of the highway.
“What’s the matter?” said Nancy.
He bent close to the windshield to look upward. “Up there,” he whispered.
Nancy saw it then. In the sky ahead of them a cluttered shadow moved slowly against the stars. Tiny, but they could make out two spheres and a snub cylinder whose great bulk could be estimated even at this distance. Navy tractors were towing the stranger, whose power was cut because its pilot could not know the field.
“How far has it come?” Nancy whispered. She understood the awe in Glenn and felt it too as if by reflection from him.
“Don’t know but we’ve got almost everything tagged within a hundred million light years. It’s probably from farther away than that.”
Beside them cars roared on the highway. Laughter from moonlight beach parties was carried up on the winds. The sea rolled in as it had done for a billion years on this and other shores. And there was an ache in Glenn Baird’s throat as he contemplated awesome times and distances while he watched the shadows in the sky disappear behind a glowing cloud.
“You’d better hurry,” suggested Nancy.
“We’ve got time. It’ll still take a half hour to get the ship down at the field.” But Glenn started off, edging into the line of traffic.
* * * *
The approaches to the Base were choked with cars. Every late driving citizen within fifty miles must have glimpsed the ship and guessed what it was, Glenn thought. He signaled a police officer at the approach to the Base and flashed his Navy insignia. The officer held back the lines of snarling cars while he sped through.
On the field daylight flamed from a thousand glaring beams). A circle of intense brilliance marked a spot before one of the great shops where the ship would be landed. Glenn jerked the car to a stop behind the Analysis Building and ran toward his own offices, dragging Nancy by the hand.
Assistant Chief of Technical Operations Walter Prentiss was on evening duty. He sat before a battery of phones, replacing one as Glenn entered. His face was as expressionless as a computing machine panel.
I “Anything of emergency class?” demanded Glenn.
Prentiss shook his head. “Operation is proceeding. Analyzer crew alerted and standing by. Environmental data complete.” He tossed a slip of paper across the desk, bearing the latter information. “In fact,” he added carelessly, “you might just as well have stayed at the party. Everything is perfectly routine.”
Glenn kept his eyes on the paper he’d picked up from the desk. He read as if wholly absorbed in the data concerning the kind of atmospheric conditions carried by the stranger ship. But he didn’t miss Prentiss’ casual words.
Walter Prentiss had expected the promotion to CSTO, the job Glenn now held. And his expectation was warranted. He was competent. He had a mind like a machine. And he was old in the ways of nepotism. He had a good mentor in his father-in-law, Commander Kendricks.
* * * *
It had hit him and Kendricks hard when Central had by-passed him in replacing the Technical Chief for Pacific Base. But Glenn’s own record had some very bright spots on it, and these had won him the post.
Prentiss had not given up yet, however—Glenn knew this for certain. And Kendricks never would. The rejection of his recommendation was a blow for which he would always hold Glenn personally responsible.
Glenn forced these snarling thoughts out of his mind. There was a job to do tonight, a big job—maybe a Fourth Order job. “Ambulance standing by?” he said.
Prentiss nodded, “Gibbs is out front preparing it to these atmosphere specifications.”
“Get four suits ready then. You and I will make the entry. Gibbs will go along. Who’s heading the Analyzer Crew?”
“Martin.”
“Him too then. Let’s go.”
The tractors were bringing the huge vessel in over the sea approach. It hung a thousand feet in the air, vertical now, landing vanes extending downward. A great spotlight picked it up, glinting on the vast faintly-scarred hull. From the thousands of cars parked about the horizons of the field came a raucous bellow of welcome and exuberance.
Glenn swore in annoyance at the distant racket. He was thankful for the ban on private flying within a ten-mi radius of Base or there would have been as many ships in the air as there were cars on the ground.
He moved across the hall to the communications room, Nancy following closely. The communicators were in contact with the towing ships and with the stranger itself. The latter was severely restricted to the basic Galactic Code, which had been picked up at Paramides.
Glenn stepped to the Code operator. “Tell them we’ll be ready to open the lock upon landing. We’ll make immediate entry with cyberlogue equipment.”
“I’m afraid they won’t understand the cyberlogue reference, sir.”
“Of course they—won’t! But give them the general idea that we will talk to them. Have they reported an understanding of lock sterilization?”
“Yes, they have already performed that operation, they said. They understand the necessity of not introducing alien germ life to our planet.”
“Good. Get them to
open that lock then. That’s the most important thing.”
Nancy trailed with him to the shop building. There he stopped her.
“This is as far as you go. I wish you’d take the car on home.”
“I’ll wait. It won’t be three days this time.” She smiled confidently.
“It might be.”
* * * *
Near the spot of light that was the target for the landing tugs he found Dr, Gibbs. The director of Base hospital was placidly sucking a long cigar that flared in regular intervals in a glare of light. He stood beside the huge double-trucked van that was his ambulance. In it could be duplicated the atmospheres of any of ten thousand worlds. Now his technicians were busily setting it for the conditions required by the stranger.
“Gibbs I” exclaimed Glenn. “Come on. You’re coming aboard with us.”
The doctor moved slowly, taking time to drop his cigar carefully and put out the ashes. “Such excitement,” he murmured. “Everybody so anxious to give our friend up there a hand—and jam it in his pocket when his back is turned. I’m a medical man. I don’t want any part of highway robbery.”
“What’s eating you, Doc?” Glenn said irritably.
Gibbs never leaned on rank. He could be addressed like a human being.
He came towards Glenn in leisurely resignation. “Everybody so anxious to rob the poor suckers of their Fourth Order drive—if they’ve got one.”
“Nobody’s going to rob anybody. We’ll negotiate for anything we can use of theirs.”
“Negotiate!” Gibbs chuckled. “That means wrapping the club in a piece of silk before you hit a guy with it.”
Glenn put an arm around Gibbs’ shoulders and hurried the older man toward the dressing room. Prentiss and Martin were already there. Shortly all four were dressed in lightweight space garb which would make possible entry into the alien ship.
The strangers were oxygen breathers, they had indicated in Code. They used it, however, at three Earth atmospheres pressure and included trace compounds such as hydrogen cyanide. In addition their air temperature was around a hundred and fifty-eight degrees with ninety percent humidity. A human being could not survive long in such environment without a suit.
Mechanically, they checked intercom equipment with each other and read off meter indications of air temperatures and pressures. Then they marched out to the apron in front of the shop.
Nancy was back against the wall of the building with the group of mechanics, technicians and engineers. Glenn wished he had insisted on her leaving. But it was too late now and he couldn’t have made her go anyway.
Sometimes there were accidents, Glenn reflected. His head bent back, looking up at that great glistening piston sliding carefully out of the sky. Sometimes a tractor slipped and a hull toppled. Sometimes a power plant…
There was the force of hydrogen bombs locked within that alien hull.
But it didn’t do any good to think of these things. Ordinarily he didn’t. It was just that he wished Nancy was home.
He could see the great landing vanes oscillating slowly. Their lower edges were less than twenty meters above the field now and the tractor operators were jockeying carefully over that target of light. The gunmetal sheen of the vessel seemed to swell in frightening proportions as it inched downward. Glenn considered the landing apron. There was six feet of reinforced concrete overlaying a massive rock foundation but the entire mass of the ship would be focused upon the three points where the landing vanes touched.
The thing was at least five hundred meters high, he thought, and a fifth that in diameter. So slowly was it descending that there was a moment’s illusion of its hanging suspended and drawing the Earth up to it by the great gravity of its mass.
Then abruptly there came a subdued sound in the Earth like the far-off whoom of an immense bomb. The stranger had touched.
CHAPTER III
Said Glenn, “Let’s go.” His voice sounded harsh to his own ears as if he had broken a spell.
He shouldered the pack straps of the cyberlogue equipment and led the way toward the ship. There was no sign yet of an entrance but he knew where it would be found. He had glimpsed a ladder against the expanse of one of the vanes. Its rungs looked as small as matchwood from a distance but as the men approached, it was seen that the span of the rungs was almost right for a man.
That was good. It meant beings that climbed and walked like humans. It could have been much different. Some strangers were so grotesquely proportioned that it was virtually impossible for a man to work within their ships.
Glenn put a gloved hand to the first rung which was at head height. The cyberlogue heavy on his back, he swung himself up, hand over hand, then started climbing. One by one Prentiss, Gibbs, and Martin followed. The searchlight caught their transparent helmets and set them glowing. To the hundreds of watchers it looked as if a crazily disjointed glowworm were inching its way up that massive vane.
Glenn paused for breath when he reached the level of the shop roof twenty meters above the floor. The vane had scarcely begun to taper and the reaction ports between the junction of the three vanes was that much farther above him.
He climbed again at a breath-conserving pace. His eyes scanned the surface of the meteor-pocked metal. None of the pocks was more than a millimeter deep. The stuff was good, he thought in admiration. As good as any in the Galaxies of the Council.
The end of the ladder appeared and there a deeper shadow yawned in the dark metal. The door of the airlock had been swung inward.
His heart beat faster. He couldn’t help it. It was like when he was a kid and his father took him down to the Navy yard for the first time to see a ship from outside the home Galaxy. The scope of vast distance separating the creatures of the universe, the power of their minds to bridge such space…
Every time it was the same. It made his throat ache with awe.
How far had this ship come? The light of its star, now reaching Earth, had started across space before sentient man appeared on this planet. But the stranger had outstripped the light of its own sun several millionfold.
Now they were here and dependent upon man for succor. Sick, they had said, and their ship in disrepair..
Glenn hoisted himself into the lock with the assistance of handrails.
He turned and helped his companions as they appeared above the level of the lock floor. Lights glowed in the ceiling of the chamber.
They turned and surveyed the surrounding walls in silence. Glenn wondered how they felt at such a moment as this. Prentiss, he knew, regarded the ship as an entity by itself. He admired or criticized a mechanism without regard to the minds of the creators. For him there existed only science—without the scientist.
Martin was a gadgeteer—a very good one or he would not be heading up the Analysis crew. He was fascinated by mechanisms, absorbed in their cleverness. It mattered not at all whether they were the optimum or what kind of mind devised them.
Gibbs was of wholly different cast. He came closest to understanding the things Glenn felt as he walked the deck of this stranger. But Gibbs had no delight in mechanisms of metal and glass. He was awed only by the variant means through which Nature had adapted sentient life to the universe—and the sometimes unbelievable similarity of such life in far removed corners of creation.
Glenn wheeled the lock door shut after examining its mechanism for a moment to be sure he could open it again.
They waited expectantly. The chamber of the ship should begin to fill automatically with the atmosphere in the mail hull sections, provided the mechanism of the stranger permitted any extrapolation at all. They were not wrong. In a moment there came the hiss of inrushing air.
The opposite door opened, giving view of a second lock, a duplicate of the one they were in. But they were still alone.
“Where’s the welcoming committee?” said Martin. “This is no way to treat, a friend.”
* * * *
The air began to fill suddenly with an opaque fog that s
wiftly cut their vision. Automatically they locked arms with one another as long training demanded. “What do you think?” said Dr. Gibbs.
“Your department,” said Glenn. “Sterilizing us and the chamber before letting us in, just as we would do in similar circumstances.”
“I was hoping that was it. A very intelligent class of life.”
The vapor faded slowly. With its passing they saw that a door leading to the interior of the ship had been opened. Within that opening stood one of the strangers.
For a long moment the two species of life regarded one another. The stranger was roughly anthropomorphic. He was grotesquely pot-bellied and very thin in all of his four limbs. His bones seemed sharply outlined as if there were great skeletal strength without corresponding muscular development. The totally hairless body was covered with a skin that resembled fine ivory-tinted leather. He wore no clothing or ornament.
Glenn advanced slowly and cautiously, taking care not to make any overt move that could be misinterpreted as hostile. He slung the cyberlogue equipment from his shoulders and set it—down, He took a cord from it and plugged into an outlet on the chest panel of his suit. Then he took from the case a small adjustable communication set and handed it to the stranger.
The latter grasped it and turned it over in his hands for a moment.
Then he seemed to nod in a gesture of excitement and clamped it carefully to his head so that the tiny speaker was over his diminutive ear canal. The nut-sized mouthpiece was close to the leathery lips.
Glenn spoke. “I am Glenn Baird, We welcome you to this galaxy and this sun and its planets. We offer you sanctuary.”
The stranger’s face lighted as the instrument at Glenn’s feet translated the words into basic semantics, from which the stranger’s own mind could devise meaning.
“I am Eindor,” he said at once. “On Paramides they talked to us with such equipment as this and said that men of Earth had made it. They said that here we could find all we need to set our ship in order again.”
Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 11