The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Abruptly it stopped. The Chief looked up; and his eyes met the Envoy’s.

  “It just may be,” said the Chief slowly, “that I owe you an apology.”

  “An apology?” said the Envoy.

  “Listen to this—” The Chief adjusted a volume control and pressed a button. A human voice speaking translated Mologhese filled the room.

  “The Committee of Control for the human race wishes to express its appreciation for—”

  “No, no—” said the Chief. “Not this diplomatic slush. Farther on—” He did things with his controls, the voice speeded up to a gabble, a whine, then slowed toward understandability again. “Ah, listen to this.”

  “. . . Association,” said the voice, “but without endorsement of what the Mologhese Authority is pleased to term the Conqueror temperament. While our two races have a great deal in common, the human race has as its ultimate aims not the exercises of war and oppression, plundering, general destruction and the establishment of a tyranny in a community of tyrants; but rather the establishment of an environment of peace for all races. The human race believes in the ultimate establishment of universal freedom, justice, and the inviolable rights of the individual whoever he may be. We believe that our destiny lies neither within the pattern of conquest nor submission, but with the enlightened maturity of independence characterized by what are known as the Shielded Worlds; and, while not ceasing to defend our people and our borders from all attacks foreign and domestic, we intend to emulate these older, protected peoples in hope that they may eventually find us worthy of association. In this hope—”

  The Chief clicked off the set and looked grimly at the Envoy. The Envoy stared back at him in shock.

  “Insane,” said the Envoy. “I was right—quite insane.” He sank back in his seat. “At any rate, you too were correct. They’re too irrational, too unrealistic to survive. We needn’t worry about them.”

  “On the contrary,” said his Chief. “And I’m to blame for not spotting it sooner. There were indications of this in some of the preliminary reports we had on them. They are very dangerous.”

  The Envoy shook his head.

  “I don’t see—” he began.

  “But I do!” said the Chief. “And I don’t hold down this position among our people for nothing. Think for a moment, Envoy! Don’t you see it? These people are causal!”

  “Causal?”

  “Exactly,” replied the Chief. “They don’t act or react to practical or realistic stimuli. They react to emotional or philosophic conclusions of their own.”

  “I don’t see what’s so dangerous about that?” said the Envoy, wrinkling his forehead.

  “It wouldn’t be dangerous if they were a different sort of race,” said the Chief. “But these people seem to be able to rationalize their emotional and philosophic conclusions in terms of hard logic and harder science.—You don’t believe me? Do you remember that story for the human young you told me about, about the three hoofed and horned creatures crossing a bridge?”

  “Of course,” said the Envoy.

  “All right. It puzzled you that the human young should react so strongly to what was merely a lesson in elementary tactics. But—it wasn’t the lesson they were reacting to. It was

  the emotional message overlaying the lesson. The notion of some sort of abstract right and wrong, so that when the somehow wrong mythical creature under the bridge gets what the humans might describe as his just deserts at the horns of the triumphing biggest right creature—the humans are tremendously stimulated.”

  “But I still don’t see the danger—”

  “The danger,” said the Chief, “lies in the fact that while such a story has its existence apparently—to humans—only for its moral and emotional values, the tactical lesson which we so obviously recognize is not lost, either. To us, this story shows a way of conquering. To the humans it shows not only a way but a reason, a justification. A race whose motives are founded upon such justifications is tremendously dangerous to us.”

  “You must excuse me,” said the Envoy, bewilderedly. “Why—”

  “Because we—and I mean all the Conqueror races, and all the Submissive races—” said the Chief, strongly, “have no defenses in the emotional and philosophic areas. Look at what you told me about the Bahrin, and the Submissives the humans took over from the Bahrin. Having no strong emotional and philosophic persuasions of their own, they have become immediately infected by the human ones. They are like people unacquainted with a new disease who fall prey to an epidemic. The humans, being self-convinced of such things as justice and love, in spite of their own arbitrariness and violence, convince all of us who lack convictions having never needed them before. Do you remember how you said you felt when you saw the little Bahrin being patted on the head? That's how vulnerable we are!”

  The Envoy shivered again, remembering.

  “Now I see,” he said.

  “I thought you would,” said the Chief, grimly. “The situation to my mind is serious, enough so to call for the greatest emergency measures possible. We mustn’t make the mistake of the creature under the bridge in the story. We were prepared to let the humans get by our community strength because we thought of them as embryo Conquerors, and we hoped for better entertainment later. Now they come along again, this time as something we can recognize as Conqueror-plus. And this time we can’t let them get by. I’m going to call a meeting of our neighboring Conqueror executive Chiefs; and get an agreement to hit the humans now with a coalition big enough to wipe them out to the last one.”

  He reached for a button below a screen on his desk. But before he could touch it, it came alight with the figure of his own attaché.

  “Sir—” began this officer; and then words failed him. “Well?” barked the Chief.

  “Sir—” the officer swallowed. “From the Shielded Worlds— a message.” The Chief stared long and hard.

  “From the Shielded Worlds?” said the Chief. “How? From the Shielded Worlds? When?”

  “I know it’s fantastic, sir. But one of our ships was passing not too far from one of the Shielded Worlds and it found itself caught—”

  “And you just now got the message?” The Chief cut him short.

  “Just this second, sir. I was just—”

  “Let me have it. And keep your channel open,” said the Chief. “I’ve got some messages to send.”

  The officer made a movement on the screen and something like a message cylinder popped out of a slot in the Chief’s desk. The Chief reached for it, and hesitated. Looking up, he found the eyes of the Envoy upon him.

  “Never—” said the Envoy, softly. “Never in known history have they communicated with any of us. . . .”

  “It’s addressed to me,” said the Chief, looking at the outside of the cylinder. “If they can read our minds, as we suspect, then they know what I’ve just discovered about the

  humans and what I plan to do about it.” He gave the cylinder a twist to open it. “Let’s see what they have to say.”

  The cylinder opened up like a flower. A single white sheet unrolled within it to lie flat on the desk; and the message upon it in the common galactic code looked up at the Chief. The message consisted of just one word. The word was:—

  NO.

  ON MESSENGER MOUNTAIN

  I

  It was raw, red war for all of them, from the moment the two ships intercepted each other, one degree off the plane of the ecliptic and three diameters out from the second planet of the star that was down on the charts as K94. K94 was a GO type star; and the yelping battle alarm of the trouble horn tumbled sixteen men to their stations. This was at thirteen hours, twenty-one minutes, four seconds of the ship’s day.

  Square in the scope of the laser screen, before the Survey Team Leader aboard the Harrier, appeared the gray, light-edged silhouette of a ship unknown to the ship’s library. And the automatic reflexes of the computer aboard, that takes no account of men not yet into their vacuum suits, took o
ver. The Harrier disappeared into no-time.

  She came out again at less than a quarter-mile’s distance from the stranger ship and released a five-pound weight at a velocity of five miles a second relative to the velocity of the alien ship. Then she had gone back into no-time again—but not before the alien, with computer-driven reflexes of its own, had rolled like the elongated cylinder it resembled, and laid out a soft green-colored beam of radiation which opened up the Harrier forward like a hot knife through butter left long on the table. Then it too was gone into no-time. The time aboard the Harrier was thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes and eighteen seconds; and on both ships there were dead.

  “There are good people in the human race,” Cal Hartlett had written only two months before, to his uncle on Earth, “who feel that it is not right to attack other intelligent beings without warning—to drop five-pound weights at destructive relative velocities on a strange ship simply because you find it at large in space and do not know the race that built it.

  “What these gentle souls forget is that when two strangers encounter in space, nothing at all is known—and everything must be. The fates of both races may hinge on which one is first to kill the other and study the unknown carcass. Once contact is made, there is no backing out and no time for consideration. For we are not out here by chance, neither are they, and we do not meet by accident.”

  Cal Hartlett was Leader of the Mapping Section aboard the Harrier, and one of those who lived through that first brush with the enemy. He wrote what he wrote as clearly as if he had been Survey Leader and in command of the ship. At any moment up until the final second when it was too late, Joe Aspinall, the Survey Leader, could have taken the Harrier into no-time and saved them. He did not; as no commander of a Survey Ship ever has. In theory, they could have escaped.

  In practice, they had no choice.

  When the Harrier ducked back into no-time, aboard her they could hear the slamming of emergency bulkheads. The mapping room, the fore weight-discharge room and the sleeping quarters all crashed shut as the atmosphere of the ship whiffed out into space through the wound the enemy’s beam had made. The men beyond the bulkheads and in the damaged sections would have needed to be in their vacuum suits to survive. There had not been time for that, so those men were dead.

  The Harrier winked back into normal space.

  Her computer had brought her out on the far side of the second planet, which they had not yet surveyed. It was larger

  than Earth, with somewhat less gravity but a deeper atmospheric envelope. The laser screen picked up the enemy reappearing almost where she had disappeared, near the edge of that atmosphere.

  The Harrier winked back all but alongside the other and laid a second five-pound weight through the center of the cylindrical vessel. The other ship staggered, disappeared into no-time and appeared again far below, some five miles above planetary surface in what seemed a desperation attempt to gain breathing time. The Harrier winked after her—and came out within five hundred yards, square in the path of the green beam which it seemed was waiting for her. It opened up the drive and control rooms aft like a red-hot poker lays open a cardboard box.

  A few miles below, the surface stretched up the peaks of titanic mountains from horizon to horizon.

  “Ram!” yelled the voice of Survey Leader Aspinwall, in warning over the intercom.

  The Harrier flung itself at the enemy. It hit like an elevator falling ten stories to a concrete basement. The cylindrical ship broke in half in midair and bodies erupted from it. Then its broken halves and the ruined Harrier were falling separately to the surface below and there was no more time for anyone to look. The clock stood at 13 hrs., 23 minutes and 4 seconds.

  The power—except from emergency storage units—was all but gone. As Joe punched for a landing the ship fell angling past the side of a mountain that was a monster among giants, and jarred to a stop. Joe keyed the intercom of the control board before him.

  “Report,” he said.

  In the Mapping Section Cal Hartlett waited for other voices to speak before him. None came. He thumbed his audio.

  “The whole front part of the ship’s dogged shut, Joe,” he said. “No use waiting for anyone up there. So—this is Number Six reporting. I’m all right.”

  “Number Seven,” said another voice over the intercom. “Maury. O.K.”

  “Number Eight. Sam. O.K.”

  “Number Nine. John. O.K. . . .”

  Reports went on. Numbers Six through Thirteen reported themselves as not even shaken up. From the rest there was no answer.

  In the main Control Section, Joe Aspinwall stared bleakly at his dead control board. Half of his team was dead.

  The time was 13 hours, 30 minutes, no seconds.

  He shoved that thought from his mind and concentrated on the positive rather than the negative elements of the situation they were in. Cal Hartlett, he thought, was one. Since he could only have eight survivors of his Team, he felt a deep gratitude that Cal should be one of them. He would need Cal in the days to come. And the other survivors of the Team would need him, badly.

  Whether they thought so at this moment or not.

  “All right,” said Joe, when the voices had ended. “We’ll meet outside the main airlock, outside the ship. There’s no power left to unseal those emergency bulkheads. Cal, Doug, Jeff—you’ll probably have to cut your way out through the ship’s side. Everybody into respirators and warmsuits. According to pre-survey—” he glanced at the instruments before him—“there’s oxygen enough in the local atmosphere for the respirators to extract, so you won’t need emergency bottles. But we’re at twenty-seven thousand three hundred above local sea-level. So it’ll probably be cold—even if the atmosphere’s not as thin here as it would be at this altitude on Earth.” He paused. “Everybody got that? Report!”

  They reported. Joe unharnessed himself and got up from his seat. Turning around, he faced Maury Taller.

  Maury, rising and turning from his own communications board on the other side of the Section, saw that the Survey

  Leader’s lean face was set in iron lines of shock and sorrow under his red hair. They were the two oldest members of the Team, whose average age had been in the mid-twenties. They looked at each other without words as they went down the narrow tunnel to the main airlock and, after putting on respirators and warmsuits, out into the alien daylight outside.

  The eight of them gathered together outside the arrowhead shape of their Harrier, ripped open fore and aft and as still now as any other murdered thing.

  Above them was a high, blue-black sky and the peaks of mountains larger than any Earth had ever known. A wind blew about them as they stood on the side of one of the mountains, on a half-mile wide shelf of tilted rock. It narrowed backward and upward like a dry streambed up the side of the mountain in one direction. In the other it broke off abruptly fifty yards away, in a cliff-edge that hung over eye-shuddering depths of a clefted valley, down in which they could just glimpse a touch of something like jungle greenness.

  Beyond that narrow clefted depth lifted the great mountains, like carvings of alien devils too huge to be completely seen from one point alone. Several thousand feet above them on their mountain, the white spill of a glacier flung down a slope that was too steep for ice to have clung to in the heavier gravity of Earth. Above the glacier, which was shaped like a hook, red-gray peaks of the mountain rose like short towers stabbing the blue-dark sky. And from these, even as far down as the men were, they could hear the distant trumpeting and screaming of winds whistling in the peaks.

  They took it all in in a glance. And that was all they had time to do. Because in the same moment that their eyes took in their surroundings, something no bigger than a man but tiger-striped and moving with a speed that was more than human, came around the near end of the dead Harrier, and went through the eight men like a predator through a huddle of goats.

  Maury Taller and even Cal, who towered half a head over the rest of the men, al
l were brushed aside like cardboard cutouts of human figures. Sam Cloate, Cal’s assistant in the mapping section, was ripped open by one sweep of a clawed limb as it charged past, and the creature tore out the throat of Mike DeWall with a sideways slash of its jaws. Then it was on Joe Aspinall.

  The Survey Team Leader went down under it. Reflex that got metal cuffs on the gloves of his warmsuit up and crossed in front of his throat, his forearms and elbows guarding his belly, before he felt the ferocious weight grinding him into the rock and twisting about on top of him. A snarling, worrying, noise sounded in his ears. He felt teeth shear through the upper part of his thigh and grate on bone.

  There was an explosion. He caught just a glimpse of Cal towering oddly above him, a signal pistol fuming in one big hand.

  Then the worrying weight pitched itself full upon him and lay still. And unconsciousness claimed him.

  II

  When Joe came to, his respirator mask was no longer on his face. He was looking out, through the slight waviness of a magnetic bubble field, at ten mounds of small rocks and gravel in a row about twenty feet from the ship. Nine crosses and one six-pointed star. The Star of David would be for Mike DeWall. Joe looked up and saw the unmasked face of Maury Taller looming over him, with the dark outside skin of the ship beyond him.

  “How’re you feeling, Joe?” Maury asked.

  “All right,” he answered. Suddenly he lifted his head in fright. “My leg—I can’t feel my leg!” Then he saw the silver anesthetic band that was clamped about his right leg, high on the thigh. He sank back with a sigh.