Sideslip

by Ted White

  When it came, it was totally anticlimactic. Mingus appeared at a side door, and crossed the room directly towards me. The people standing near me parted uneasily to let him through, and he said, “Our host wishes to speak to us in private. I believe he remains unsatisfied about our respective theologies.” His tone carried a thin edge of scorn, and his manner was so open that no one looked twice as we moved together for the side door.

  There were no guards to bar our way. Mingus had dealt with them. I did not ask him how. We took the fire stairs down to the first floor, and then strolled innocently out into the lobby. Like many buildings in this area, it had been erected as a luxury building, and had been furnished with what passed for taste among the newly well-to-do who flocked to its prestigious address. There were slabs of marble, and cut-edged mirrors browned with age, and the outer doors were made of an elaborate wrought-iron grill-work, surfaced with glass. We leaned against them, pushing against their ponderous weight, and then we were out, on the street again.

  It was only then that I realized the extent to which the sandalwood scent had permeated that building. On the sidewalk, I breathed clean air.

  We crossed over the Drive, to a quiet-looking black car parked at the opposite curb. Its layout was more conventional than that of the yellow jackets’ cars; there was a hood up front.

  Mingus slipped easily into the driver’s seat, and slipped a key into its lock. He turned it, and then pulled the car smoothly and silently out from the curb.

  The only sounds were the humming of the tires until I inquired, “Just how is this car powered? I’ve noticed that none of the cars here make any noise.”

  He turned to stare at me for a moment, his deep hawk’s eyes probing with puzzlement. Then he swung the car into a turn and up the access ramp to the Hudson River Drive. “Powered, Mr. Archer? Precisely as all automobiles are powered—with an engine.”

  I’d goofed. By now I was assuming everyone knew I was from somewhere else, an alien unfamiliar with many of the daily minutiae of this particular time and place. “I mean, the sort of engine, of course. Years ago, internal combustion was used, for instance,” I said lamely.

  “Well, yes. But not since the Angels came. One of the divine inspirations they brought us was the thermal engine, which utilizes the properties of heat exchange. It is quite efficient, and does not produce dangerous waste products into the air. How is it that you are unaware of this?”

  I changed the subject. “Where are we going?”

  “To the launching port. As I told you, the Angel Sharna is returning to the Heavens. She has little time remaining.” He shook his head. “She required that I be circumspect, or we might’ve been there by now.”

  “I’d say you’ve done enough work for the evening,” I said. “The Nazis are going to find a few surprises waiting for them when they close up for the night.”

  Mingus only smiled.

  I guess I was expecting some sort of Cape Kennedy launching-pad complex—acres of concrete, bunkers, tall spidery cranes, and all the rest. So the launching port was something of a disappointment in that respect. But in other ways it was far more exciting.

  We’d crossed the Bronx and driven out onto Long Island—I did not ask Mingus why we were taking such a roundabout route; for all I knew, the expressway system was very different here—and somewhere beyond the boundary line of Queens, we topped a low rise, and spread before us was a sight which chilled me with awe.

  An entire field was glowing in its own light. And, perched upon it, lying on its side like a beached whale, was a huge cigar-shaped object.

  The light seemed to emanate from the very ground itself, and the great ship—it was obviously the Angels’ spaceship—was lit only from the underside, its upper portions in deep shadow, only a few highlights picked out by interior lights or those of nearby buildings.

  The ship looked like something out of an early science fiction magazine—from before the days of the sleek rockets with tail-fins. “Cigar-shaped”—that’s a cliche, from the days of the flying-saucer scare, and even as I thought of that, I wondered. . . . Had airlines pilots who reported such UFO’s actually seen cruising Angel scouts? If there were Angels in my own universe—would they not have scouted us out as they did here?

  I tried to estimate the ship’s size as we drove down closer to it. And as I did so, I realized that my first estimates were way off: the ship was much bigger than I’d thought.

  Then we were at the gates to the field, and I could see through them while a bored and slightly contemptuous yellowjacket checked us through. He seemed nettled to find Mingus’s papers in order, and I gathered that no love was lost between the yellowjacket mercenaries and the Believers. But all of this I caught with only half an ear. Ahead was what commanded my attention.

  The ship rose high over us, even at a distance I computed at roughly a quarter of a mile. It nested in great yokes which provided firm support all along its curved underside. The yokes apparently provided^ access as well, for I saw tiny dots of people, shadows on the glowing surface of the field, moving in and out of openings at the base of one great yoke. As for the ship itself, it seemed to curve away in the distance, and I realized that it must be no less than a mile. long. The thought staggered my imagination.

  To my disappointment, Mingus drove away from the ship, towards a nearby building which, in its flat, slab-sided design, seemed prosaic and out of place. We pulled into a parking slot alongside a half-dozen other cars, and then Mingus motioned me out.

  We climbed the steps into what appeared to be an administration building, and Mingus hurried me through an empty anteroom, down a corridor, and into an office.

  Standing in the office, her back to me, was a tall and familiar figure.

  “Sharna!” I said.

  She turned. A smile lit her face with radiant warmth. “Ronald,” she said. “Oh, Ronald, I’m so glad you’re here!” And she opened her arms in an age-old gesture.

  We were embracing and kissing warmly before I thought to remind myself of Mingus. I half-pulled away, turning to look at him.

  His face was ashen, its ferocity drained and a curiously empty look in his eyes.

  “Eric,” said Sharna, softly, hesitatingly.

  His expression did not change.

  “Eric,” she repeated. “This man has been Called. He is coming with me to the Home Worlds.”

  Later Sharna apologized to me. “I did not think. It simply did not occur to me that the man was so caught up in his religion. What he saw—well, I guess even Kordamon could not be more shocked.” She covered a small giggle. “But it was wrong of me not to think of it; he has been of great help to us—especially to me. After all, he brought you back to me.”

  I was still dazed by the speed with which things had moved. It was fortuitous, as Sharaa explained it, that a ship was readying for departure on this evening, but ships did leave on a regular, fortnightly, basis.

  There was a good reason for their bulk, I discovered. These ships were not primarily intended for ferrying human passengers, although from their spacious and luxurious accommodations that was less than obvious. But they were, primarily, freighters.

  What I had not seen, because it had been hidden beneath the surface of the field, was a complex rail network which connected with the major freight railroads of the area, and also with the docking facilities on the nearby waterways. It was all automated, and loading areas were a good three quarters of a mile away from where I’d seen people entering and leaving. Again, access was through one of the launching yokes, giant devices as large as a large office building.

  The ships were moved by various applications of gravity, I learned. Not only was an artificial gravity maintained aboard for the passengers’ convenience, but a form of antigravity lifted the ship off-planet, and another form of, well, I’d guess antigravity, although I never understood it well enough to explain, warped space in such a way that the ship could cross interstellar space in a matter of days or weeks, rather than mil
lennia.

  The essential machinery for all this meddling with gravity was required whether you used a ship no bigger than a jetliner, or one the size of a small city. In fact, it was more economical to deal with the larger of the two sizes, when one began figuring in the costs of freight-transport.

  And the Pamorr was in fact a small city. It measured, Sharna told me, about two and a half miles in length, and over a quarter of a mile in diameter. Later I found out that its antigravity units are never turned off while it’s docked; if they were it would crush the landing yokes and probably break apart. It had been constructed, and would be serviced when necessary, in space, in free-fall.

  Sharna tried to explain it to me as a small car just big enough for the two of us and our driver sped us across the field.

  “I decided to turn a defeat into victory. I decided that if I was to return to the Home Worlds, I would bring you, too, and launch a new campaign for the freedom of your world.” She gave me a curiously shy look. “I . . . had more personal reasons too, of course. . .

  She told me a lot more, too, but I had difficulty absorbing it all. The assault to my senses was just too great.

  The car swung in, under the gleaming bulk of the ship, and I felt for a moment the claustrophobic notion that it was about to fall and crush us. Then we’d pulled up at the foot of the yoke.

  I took one last look up, and out, at the starry sky of the planet Earth, and then followed Sharna onto—then off of—an escalator that deposited us within the bowels of the starship Pamorr.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “We leave in three hours,” Sharna had said. But three hours weren’t long enough for me to get used to the idea.

  First I ran the gamut of Angel doctors, all of whom carefully poked me, examined me, and took samples of about everything I had. It was painless, but hard on my tattered dignity. Still, it was easier to accept such details than to come to grips with the trip I was about to take.

  The idea that we were going to travel across “one-seventh of the effective radius of the Galaxy” meant nothing to me at the time. Even the fact that it was going to take less than two weeks meant little to me. I’d never known that much about Einstein for it to surprise me that something he’d said was impossible turned out to be possible after all—faster-than-light travel.

  As for the ship itself, I don’t think I ever did really get used to it. I remembered all those one and two man satellites we were putting into orbit back “home.” To me that sort of thing was a spaceship, and you named it “Freedom Seven” or “Gemini Five.”

  But this spaceship was named the Pamorr, and it was not only a freighter but an immense self-contained pleasure-city, Sharna said, and it carried beings and artifacts from all over the Galaxy ... a Galaxy in which the Angels were far from being alone.

  In fact, they were only about the third-ranking power, and there were dozens of stellar empires and federations, plus innumerable smaller political units ranging downward from a tiny federation of only 100 or so stars to tens of thousands of single free planets. So she told me, anyway.

  “That’s great,” I answered her, “but if you expect me to understand much from now on until we get there, you better give it to me in words of not very damn many syllables.”

  Once on board, it got boring for me very quickly. I didn’t see much of Sharna; she was getting in touch with people on what she called the Home Worlds, preparing for crucial discussions concerning, Earth’s colonial status. The Angels had, it seemed, communications gizmos that compared to radio as radio compared to smoke signals. They could talk clear across the Galaxy with no time lag —and even I knew that was impossible. I’d watched some of those TV programs sending pictures back from the moon, where just from there it took the radio waves seven seconds to get back to Earth.

  There wasn’t anything for me to do. I gawked at the other passengers on the ship for a while, and picked up some scraps of information from Sharna about them.

  Most planets that developed life, developed it in humanoid form, and the Pamorr seemed to be carrying a random collection of about a thousand of them.

  The trouble was, they pretty much ignored me. Oh, they didn’t treat me like a prisoner or some kind of savage, but with Sharna tied up elsewhere there was no one to translate or explain things for me.

  There was no one to talk to. I didn’t know any of the half-dozen or so major galactic languages that served as lingua francas, and the dozen or so Angels that had boarded the Pamorr with us were little interested in talking to one of their aborigines.

  And it didn’t make much difference that the Pamorr was supposed to offer the environment of a pleasure-cruiser, either. Sure, there were thousands of things to do —entertainments available to any passenger who wished to take part in them.

  But I didn’t know what they were, and nobody bothered explaining them. I found myself standing around, wondering just what the hell was happening.

  I found myself lying about all day in my private cabin —apartment would be a better word. It was a three-room suite, bedroom, convenience, and livingroom, I’d guess you’d call it. There were a lot of hidden gadgets that I didn’t know how to work, three-dimension pictures that looked like windows onto cities, and which dimmed during the “night” when everyone slept, and various examples of alien flora which I left entirely to themselves. Food was brought four times a “day,” and that was almost my only involuntary contact with others.

  Put it down to rampant paranoia if you will. I was just plain scared to go out and mingle with the others. It gnawed on me: I was an alien; they were all acquaintances. I was the runty new kid on the block; I was the African primitive hauled before the courts of Europe. You can bet I was sure they snickered—or whatever the alien equivalent is—behind their sleeves at me.

  There was Sharna, of course, but, “It would be impossible to arrange for us to share quarters, darling,” she told me, soon after takeoff, 'when I was being shown my rooms. I wasn’t aware we’d actually taken off, as a matter of fact, until she mentioned it casually, later. “I’ll try to spend time with you when I can, but here we must be circumspect.” And, with a fast kiss, she had left me.

  Finally I protested to Sharna. “Look, I’ve been kicking around here for five days now, and I’m going stir-crazy. I don’t understand anything that’s going on, on board this ship, and what’s worse I can’t understand what any of ’em are even saying. At least you could give me a book or something, so I could maybe say ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ ”

  She smiled, ruefully. “I’d totally forgotten about . . .

  the fact that you don’t even know the tongue of the Home Worlds. But you don’t need a book. How do you think I learned to speak perfect English in eight hours?”

  “Didn’t really think about it. Prayer and fasting, maybe?”

  She ignored me. “It takes about four hours—it’s like sleep-learning, only this works the first time. It was invented I don’t know how many thousands of years ago, on the other side of the Galaxy. The Home Worlds modified it a little bit, and—”

  “Hypnosis, huh?”

  “I won’t try to explain it; some of it will explain itself. It takes about four hours, then another day or so while your mind gets used to all the new currents flowing around in the language and speech centers. It can be upsetting, the first time you learn a language on it, though. . .

  “Never mind about that,” I said, “my mind could probably use a few new pleats in it anyway. Lead me to it.”

  It was like seeing double, only much worse: shutting my eyes didn’t help.

  When I regained consciousness in the language tank, I felt fine. Then the technician asked me how I felt.

  “Torlagoths'ammar k’inpathasson,” I answered, without thinking about it one way or another.

  Schizophrenia must be like that—my ears couldn’t believe the message they’d just gotten from my voice, while most of the rest of my mind seemed to be quite satisfied that it had just conveyed the concept, �
�Oh, I feel pretty good, thank you.” What I’d said in Suolinat actually translated back into English as, “By Inpa, I feel fit enough to walk from Torla to Thasson.”

  Then my brain turned inside out, trying to account for that.

  I shut my eyes and watched the sounds of an alien language bounce around inside my skull, while little grey mechanisms somewhere were clicking off bits of random information. Torla was one of the two Home Worlds. Home Worlds = Suolan. Thasson was the other Home World.

  You didn’t walk between one planet and the other, an unsatisfied phrase in English announced itself; it’s just an idiom, came the answer in Suolinat, but which actually came out “forlissha’narapthon"

  All in all, the worst hangover I ever had compared favorably with the next two days.

  Eventually it got to the point where I could hear a Suolanian speak in his own language, forget I ever thought of him as an “Angel,” and answer him intelligently in Suolinat.

  But half the time I then had to stop and translate that back into English so that I could make the idioms make sense.

  It was like Japanese—Suolinat required a different mode of thinking. It wasn’t simply another way of saying the same thing.

  But the Suolanians were good technicians and knew what they were doing; the language tank impressed not simply vocabulary and grammar, but also a vast set of overtones, cultural and historical data, and total knowledge of the techniques of the language. The only thing it didn’t teach was how to get used to thinking in two languages perfectly at the same time.

  Eventually the sensation of having been on a ten-day drunk faded away, and I decided to try out my new language and knowledge on the Pamorr' s pleasure-cruiser resources.

  It wasn’t that easy.

  For one thing, I wasn’t telepathically sensitive, so I was unable to enjoy the mind-wars of Freith. I knew absolutely nothing about the 50,000 year history of Shaishr’, and so I was totally unable to appreciate the subtleties of their ritual love-dances, which Sharna later told me have the reputation of conveying the ultimate in erotic nuances; to me it had looked like nothing so much as two people on opposite sides of a room standing stock-still for three quarters of an hour. .