“What’s going on?” Goldspring groaned. “What’s happened, Carl—in God’s name—”
DONNAN stopped before a clump of peaceful men. He recognized them as scientists and technicians, mostly, huddled together, eyes glassy with shock. Their guardian was the planetographer Easterling, who had found an automatic rifle somewhere. He poked the muzzle in Donnan’s direction. “Move along.” he rapped. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“Nor me, Sam.” Donnan kept hands well away from his own pistol. “I just returned. Been away the better part of a week, me and Arnold here. What the hell broke loose?”
Easterling lowered his weapon. He was a big young Negro; an ancient fear had doubled his bitterness at this violence which seethed toward explosion. But Donnan’s manner eased his hostility. He had to raise his voice as a fresh babble of shouts—“Kill the swine! Kill the swine!”—broke loose from a score of men gathered some yards off. But his tone became steadier:
“Huh! No wonder you look so bug-eyed. Hell’s the right word, man. All hell let out for noon. Half of ’em want to hang Yule and half of ’em want to give him a medal . . . and they’re split apart on the question of where to go and what to do anyway, so this has turned arguments into fights. We had one riot a few hours back. It sputtered out when the marines beat off an attack on the boat. But now another attack’s building up. When they’ve got enough nerve together, they’ll try again to lynch Yule. Then the pro-Yules’ll hit the lynchers from behind, I s’pose. Those who want to go to Monwaing and those who want to go hide in some other cluster are close to blows on that difference too. Me, I hope we here can stay out of harm’s way till the rest have knocked some sense back into each other. Come join us, we need sober men.”
“I never thought—” Goldspring covered his eyes. “The best men the whole United States could find . . . they said . . . men come to this!”
Donnan spat. “With Earth gone, and a commander whose nerve went to pieces, I’m not surprised. What touched this mob action off, Sam? Where is the captain, anyway?”
“Dead,” Easterling answered flatly. “We did get the whole story this morning, before the situation went completely to pot. Seems Bowman, the exec, made a pass at Yule. Or so Yule claims.
Yule tried to kill him, bare-handed. Bowman had a gun, but Yule got it away from him. Captain Strathey came running to stop the fight. The gun went off. An accident, probably . . . only then Yule proceeded to shoot Bowman too, with no doubt about malice aforethought. A couple of marines jumped him—too late. He’s confined in Boat One now for court martial. Lieutenant Howard assumed command. But as the day wore on, most of the camp stopped paying any attention to him.”
“I was afraid of something like this,” Donnan breathed. “Yule wasn’t scared of Bowman, I’ll bet; he could’a said no and let the matter rest. He was scared of himself. So are a lot of those guys milling around there.”
“I wish we’d all died with Earth,” Goldspring choked.
“TO HELL with that noise,” Donnan said. “Those are good men. Good, you hear? Nothing wrong with ’em except they’ve had the underpinnings, and props and keystones and kingposts, knocked out from their lives. Strathey was the one who failed. He should have provided something new, immediately, to take up the slack and give the wound a chance to heal. Howard’s failing ’em still worse. Why the blue blazes does he stand there gibbering? Why don’t he take charge?”
“How?” Easterling’s teeth flashed in a wolf grin.
“By not quacking at everybody but addressing himself directly to the ones like you, that he can see have got more self-control than average,” Donnan said. “Organize them into an anti-riot guard. Issue clubs and tear gas bombs. Break a few heads, maybe, if he has to; but restore order before this thing gets completely out of hand. And then, stop asking them what they think we ought to do. Tell them what we’re going to do.”
“I think,” said a man behind Easterling, very softly, “that Howard planned to get married when he came home.”
“That’s no excuse,” Donnan replied. “Or if it is, we need somebody who doesn’t make excuses.”
Goldspring watched him for a long moment; and bit by bit, all their eyes swung to him. No one spoke.
Me? Donnan thought wildly.
Me?
But I’m nobody. Ranch kid, tramp, merchant seaman, then an engineering degree and a bunch of jobs around the world. A few investments got me a bit of money that’s now gone in smoke, and I made friends with a Senator who’s now ash in the lava. I wanted badly enough to get on the Franklin—as what man didn’t who had any salt in his blood?—that I lobbied for myself for six months. So I got an assignment, to study any interesting outplanet mechanical techniques we might happen upon. I did, on a dozen planets in four separate civilization-clusters; but anyone in my profession could have done as well. It wasn’t important anyway. The Franklin’s real purpose was to get a sketch of a beginning of a ghost of an idea of the Galaxy, its layout and characteristics, beyond what we’d learned from Monwaing. And to develop American spacefaring techniques. Both of which purposes became meaningless when America sank . . .
Me take over? I’d only get killed trying!
Donnan wet his lips.
For a moment his heartbeat drowned the mob noise. He brought the pulse under control, but he must still husk a few times before he could say, “Okay, let’s get started.”
IV
O western wind, when wilt thou blow, That the small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!
—Anon. (16th century)
AS the Europa matched vectors, the missile became visible to unaided eyes. Sigrid Holmen looked from her pilot board and saw the shark form, still kilometers away but magnified by the screen, etched against blackness and thronged stars. Her finger poised on the emergency thrust button.
Something would go wrong, she told herself wildly. It would, and no human muscles could close the engine circuit fast enough for the ship to escape. To travel so far and then return to be killed!
But did that matter? herself answered in uprushing anguish. When Earth was an ember, when hills and forests were vanished, when every trace of her folk from the time they entered the land to hunt elk as the glaciers melted to the hour when Father and Mother bade her good-by in their old red-roofed house . . . when everything was gone? One senseless kick of some cosmic boot, and the whole long story came to an end and had all, all been for nothing.
Hatred of the murderers, crowded out fear and grief alike. Hatred focused so sharply on the thing which pursued her ship that it seemed the steel must melt.
Steadily, then, her finger rested. She watched the missile drift across her view as it checked acceleration to change course. She watched it begin to overhaul again. Still the Europa plodded away from dead Earth at a stolid five gravities; and still Chief Gunnery Officer Vukovic crouched immobile over her instruments, adjusting her controls. Time stretched until Sigrid felt time must rip across.
“Bien,” Alexandra Vukovic said, and punched a button of her own.
The slugs that hosed from No. One turret were not visible, but she leaned back and reached into her shapeless uniform tunic. She even grinned a little. The pack of cigarettes was not yet out of her pocket when the slugs struck. From end to end they smote the missile. Thermite plus oxidizer seamed it with white fire. Sigrid watched the thin plates torn open, curling as if in agony. Good! she exulted.
The missile dropped from view. She cut paragrav thrust and asked the radar officer, Katrina Tenbroek, for a reading. The Dutch girl forced herself out of a whitefaced daze and reported the missile had ceased acceleration.
“We killed its brain, then,” Alexander Vukovic said. “As I hoped. I know we did not simply kill its engines. I took care not to strike that far aft. So the warhead is now disarmed. Well and good, we can approach.”
SHE spoke the French that was the common language of the expedition with a strong Serbian accent, but fluently. Her wi
ry frame relaxed easy as a cat in the chair, and no further expression showed on her scarred face.
She’s tough, Sigrid thought, not for the first time. Had to be, I suppose, to fight the Russians in the “Balkan incident” of 1980 as she did. But when the whole Earth has died . . . no, it isn’t human to stay that cool!
Then she noticed how raggedly Alexandra inhaled her cigarette, and how fingernails had drawn blood from the gunner’s palm.
Captain Edith Poussin’s voice rapped over the intercom: “Oh, no, you don’t, my dears. We aren’t coming near that thing. It may be booby-trapped.”
“But Madam!” Sigrid Holmen sat straight in astonishment. “You agreed—when we decided there was a chance to capture it for examination—I mean, what’s the use, if now we won’t take a look?”
“We will,” said Captain Poussin. “Yes, indeed. And perhaps find out whose it is, no?”
Sigrid envisaged her in the central control chamber, plump, gray, reminding more of some Dordogne housewife than an anthropologist and xenologist with an astronautical degree from the University of Oao on Unya. But her tone was like winter, and suddenly the pilot remembered those grandmothers who had sat knitting beneath the guillotine.
“Let us not be fools,” Edith Poussin continued. “Two missiles we destroyed, one we have disabled. But does that not argue they orbit in trios? I think we can expect more to come along at any moment, as they happen within detection range of us. Fortunately, we have not such a great heavy ship as the Americans or Russians did. However, speed and maneuverability will not save us from a mass onslaught. No, our first duty is to escape.” Clipped: “I want three volunteers to make us fast to that missile and examine it while we proceed toward the nearest interference fringe. Respectively a navigation officer, weapons expert and electronician.”
Sigrid rose. She was a tall young Swede, eyes blue and Italian-cut hair yellow, her features regular without being exceptional but her form handsomer than most. On that account she chose to wear less clothing than most of the Europa’s hundred women. (But vanity had departed with Earth and hope.) She was only conscious of an adrenalin tingle as she said, “That’s us here.”
“Aye,” said Alexandra. Katrina Tenbroek shook her head. “No,” she stammered. “Please.”
“Are you afraid?” scoffed the Yugoslav.
“None of that, Vukovic!” the captain’s voice interjected. “Apologize at once.”
“Afraid?” Katrina shook her head. “What is there to be afraid of, after today? B-b-but I have to cry . . . for a while . . . I’m sorry.”
ALEXANDRA stared at the deck. The scar on her cheek stood lividly forth. “I’m sorry too,” she mumbled. “It is only that I don’t dare cry.” She turned on her heel.
“Wait!” Sigrid was surprised to hear herself call. “Wait till we’re relieved.”
Alexandra stopped. “Of course. Stupid of me. I—oh—” She smashed the butt of her cigarette and took another. Sigrid almost reminded her that there would be no more tobacco when the ship’s supply was gone, not ever again, but checked the words in time.
Father, she thought. Mother. Nils. Olaf. Stockholm Castle, and sailboats among the islands, and that funny friendly little man in
Lapland the year we took our vacation there. The whole Earth.
I should not have studied space piloting. I should not have gone on practice cruises. That was time I could have spent with them. I should not have taken this berth. I sold my right to die with them. Oh, no, no, no, I am having a nightmare, I am insane, this cannot be! Or else God himself has gone senile and crazy. Why is the sun still shining? How does it dare?
Her relief, Herta Eisner, entered with Yael Blum and Marina Alberghetti. All three looked unnaturally relaxed. Sigrid knew why when the German girl extended a box of pills.
“No,” Sigrid said. “I don’t want to hide behind any damned chemistry.”
“Take that tranquilizer,”„ Captain Poussin called. “Everyone.
That’s an order. We can’t afford emotions yet.”
Sigrid gulped and obeyed. As she and Alexandra proceeded down the starboard corridor, she felt the drug take hold: an inward numbness, but a tautening and swiftening of the logical mind, so that ideas fairly flew across the surface. Red-haired Engineer Gertrud Hedtke of Switzerland met them at the suit locker. She pushed a paragrav barrow loaded with the tools and coiled cable they would need. Wordless, they helped each other into their spacesuits and went out the airlock.
SPACE gloomed and glittered around them.
The sun was a fire too fierce to look at, the Milky Way an infinitely cold cataract, stars and stars filled the sky—through which, in free fall, they went endlessly tumbling. Away from the ship’s background sounds, silence pressed inward till one’s own breath became a noise like an elemental force. The noise of the quern Grotte, Sigrid thought remotely, which the giantesses Fenja and Menja turn beneath the sea, which grinds forth salt and cattle and treasure, broad lands and rich harvests and springtime dawns; which grinds forth war, bloody spears, death and burning and Fimbul Winter.
She turned her back on Grotte, scornfully, and gave her attention to the job.
The Europa, a slim tapered cylinder, as beautiful to see as she was to handle, had matched velocities with the missile at some four kilometers’ remove. That should be safe, even if the hydrogen warhead did go off; empty space won’t transmit concussion, and at that distance the screens could ward off radiant energy sufficiently well. Flitting about on paragrav units, the girls attached twin cables to the kingbrace amidships and paid them out on their way to the prize.
Modern galactic technology was marvelous, thought Sigrid; these metal cords which could withstand fifty thousand tons of pull were no thicker than her little finger and massed no more than a hundred kilos per kilometer. But I’d rather weave a bast rope with bleeding hands, to use on a green Earth, she cried within her.
The drug suppressed the wish. She approached the missile with no fear of an explosion. Her death would be meaningless, even welcome, when Earth’s children and men were dead. Quickly she helped patch the cables on, then she and Alexandra left Gertrud to make a proper weld while they both ducked into a hole burned through the shell.
Darkness inside was total. As Sigrid groped for the flash button on her wrist, Captain Poussin’s voice sounded in her helmet receiver: “Other objects detected approaching. We can outrun them at one-point-five gravities, I think. Stand by.” She braced herself against the surge of weight.
Undiffused, the flashbeams were puddles of illumination which picked crowded enigmatic machinery out of night. Sigrid squirmed after Alexandra until they reached a central passageway big enough to stand in. The missile was being towed with its main axis transverse to the acceleration, so that they could walk down its length.
Gauges and switches threw back the light from a tangle of wires. A faceless troll shape in her armor, Alexandra asked low, “Do you recognize any of this?”
“KANDEMIRIAN?” Sigrid hesitated. “I think so. I don’t know their languages or . . . or anything . . . but once I saw their principal alphabet in a dictionary. I believe the letters and numbers looked like this.” One clumsy gauntlet pointed to a meter dial.
“Give me some light and I’ll photograph a sample. The Old Lady will know.” Alexandra unslung the camera from her waist. “But I can tell you for certain, this missile is Kandemirian built. They taught us what little was known about outworld military equipment, at the officers’ academy in Belgrade. I’ve seen pictures of just this type. This corridor we’re in is for workmen to move around, making repairs, and for technicians to go program the brain. Those vermin,” she added colorlessly.
“Kandemir. The nomad planet. But why would they—”
“Imperialists. They’ve already overrun a dozen worlds.”
“But that’s hundreds of light-years from here!”
“We’ve been gone for more than two years, Sigrid. Much could have happened. “Alexandra laughed; t
he sound echoed in her helmet. “Much did happen. Come, let’s look at the brain. That’ll be toward the bow.”
At the end of the passage they found the controls, what the thermite shells had left of them. Sigrid swung her light around, searching for any trace of—of what? A scrawl on the bulkhead caught her eye.
She leaned closer. “What’s this?” she asked. “See here. Something scribbled in some kind of grease pencil.”
“Notes to refer to, as the writer worked at programming the brain,” Alexandra guessed. “Ummm . . . sacre bleu, I swear there are two distinct symbologies. Perhaps one is a non-Kandemirian alphabet? I’ll photograph them for Madam.” She busied herself. Sigrid gazed into blackness.
Gertrud came fumbling and clumping along. “Finish quickly, please,” she said. “I just got a message from the ship. Still more missiles are on their way. We shall have to cast loose the tow and go at high acceleration to escape them.”
“Well, I think we’ve gotten everything from this beast we need,” Alexandra said.
Sigrid followed the others numbly. She did not begin to come to herself until they were back in the Europa.
THE ship throbbed with gathering speed, outward bound, soon to go superlight and return to the stars. Earth’s corpse and the hounds that guarded it receded sternward. As their tranquilizers wore off, most, of the crew wept. Hysterics had been forestalled; they simply wept in quiet hopelessness.
After some hours, Captain Poussin summoned the missile party to her cabin. Walking down the corridor, Sigrid felt her eyes hot and puffed. But I am over the worst, she decided. I will mourn you forever, Earth, Father and Mother, but I am no longer willing to die. For while we live, there is the hope of revenge; and infinitely more, the hope of homes and children on some New Earth where you shall never be forgotten.
The Day After Doomsday Page 4