Collision Course

by Robert Silverberg

  Beyond the capacity of the human mind. But, Bernard realized, it might have been the simplest thing in the world for a race as advanced as the Rosgollans. An after-dinner stunt, a casual flip of a craft across thousands of light-years— hardly worth mentioning.

  He felt profoundly uneasy.

  Yet, even so, there was comfort. The Rosgollans were half a million years ahead, evolutionally. And they could work miracles. But how many accomplishments of man would seem like miracles to the man of only a few hundred years earlier? Not to mention man of half a million years.

  Where were we half a million years ago? Bernard wondered. We were pounding our hairy chests, brachiating gaily through the trees, cooking our uncles for dinner, maybe even eating them raw if cooking hadn’t been invented yet.

  And yet we came all the way from Pithecanthropus erectus to the transmat era in half a million years—picking up speed as we came. That’s a hell of a long journey in not really a hell of a long time. So who’s to say where we’ll be half a million years from now? Who can predict where we’ll be when we’re as old as the Rosgollans are now?

  It was a warm, comforting kind of thought. For the first time since the long journey had begun, back in the hopeless wastes of Central Australia, Bernard felt a moment of certainty, of understanding man’s relation to the universe.

  The new warmth flooded dizzyingly over him.

  “Hey, Bernard. Bernard? Are you feeling all right?” Dominici asked.

  “Uh—yes. Sure. Why do you ask?”

  “You looked so queer all of a sudden. You got a kind of funny smile on your face for a second, a smile that I’ve never seen on you before.”

  “I was—thinking about something,” he said quietly. “Some pieces fitted together. And I—well, I just felt good for a second. I still do.” He leaned forward. “Dom, tell me about the Norglans, biologically speaking. As much as you could figure out.”

  Dominici frowned. “Well—for one thing, they’re obviously mammals.”

  “Of course. How about their evolutionary decent?”

  “They stem from some primate-like creature, I’m pretty certain. Of course, there are big differences, but that’s only to be expected across a gulf of twelve or fifteen thousand light-years. The eyes, the double elbow—these are things we don’t have. But other than that, at least on external evidence alone, I’d say they were pretty much like us.”

  “A younger race than we are, would you say?” Bernard went on.

  Uncertainty hooded Dominici’s eyes. “Younger? No, I wouldn’t say that. I’d be inclined to say they were an older race than we are.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Dominici shrugged. “Call it a hunch. They seem settled in their ways, stratified almost. The difference couldn’t be much—two or three thousand years, maybe—but I have a definite feeling they’ve been civilized longer than we have.”

  “I tend to agree,” Havig said from his corner of the cabin. “From what little I could catch of that complicated language of theirs, I’d say it’s a highly evolved one—the sort of language a race might have been speaking for a couple of thousand years. But what’s on your mind, Bernard? Why the sudden questions?”

  Bernard shrugged. “I’m piecing together something to tell the Technarch when we get back,” he said flatly, and made no other attempt at an explanation.

  The gong sounded, signalling conversion. Conversion came; not long after, Nakamura came aft to let the passengers know that this time the ship was square on course, and that a meal was about to be served.

  They ate quietly. There was no reason to be jubilant after such a mission to the stars. They were all conscious that they were returning to Earth after a mission that had ended in unexpected diminution of man’s place in the universe. The news they bore would hardly be welcome to the people of the Terran worlds or to that hard, inflexibly proud man who had impelled them to take this journey. Harsh truths are rarely welcomed.

  Havig remained in the galley to give Nakamura a hand with the job of clearing away the meal. Bernard returned to the cabin with Stone and Dominici. A hush had fallen over them once again. Each minute, now, brought them closer to Earth, to the reckoning with the Technarch.

  Stone sat quietly on his bunk, his hands covering his face. Bernard looked up suddenly and realized that the pudgy diplomat was weeping.

  He went over to him.

  “Stone. Snap out of it!”

  “Leave me alone!” was the muffled reply.

  “Come on, knock it off…”

  “Go away.”

  “Dammit,” Bernard said hoarsely, “what are you crying about, anyway? Does the fact that Earthmen aren’t the big cheeses we used to think we were upset you so damned much? Or is it the fact that you’re probably out of a job in the Archonate that’s digging into you?”

  Stone looked up, white-faced, red-eyed, with the shocked look of a man whose most carefully hidden secret has been punctured. “How dare you say that…”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “What are you trying to…”

  “Admit it,” Bernard said in a deliberately harsh voice. “Face the truth. It’s a habit we all could stand to cultivate around here.”

  The diplomat looked as though he’s been given five strokes with a neural whip. He shrank into himself and after a moment’s silence said in a soft, distant voice, “All right, it’s the truth. I won’t try to hide it any more. For twenty-five years I’ve been training for the Archonate, and it’s all shot to hell now. I’ve got no career left. I’m nothing but a used-up shell. Am I supposed to be happy about the way things have turned out? Do you think they would ever pick as Archon the very man who brought back the crushing news that we— that we…”

  Stone could not go on.

  He started to blubber again. Bernard felt uncomfortable and helpless, as he stood there watching the fleshy shoulders shake uncontrollably.

  I might as well let him cry, Bernard thought. Maybe his career’s finished and maybe it isn’t, but he can use the nervous release anyway. God knows, we all can.

  Bernard returned to his bunk. After a while he saw Stone rise, wash his face, dry his eyes, and jab his arm with a spraytube of a sedative. The diplomat lay down again and was asleep almost at once. Bernard remained awake, watching the grayness of the vision screen, watching the steadily advancing hands of the clock. His mood was a depressed one, yet not as bleak as it might have been. It had been, he knew, a valuable voyage—for him, for everyone on Earth. Earth had learned some things about itself that it desperately had needed to find out—and so had Martin Bernard. Some of his actions surprised him, as he looked back. His burst of sympathy and understanding for Havig, for instance.

  The trip had broadened him, had extended his knowledge of himself and of others. He could look back now and see the Martin Bernard of the recent past in a cold, clear new perspective.

  What he saw hardly pleased him.

  He saw a self-centered, almost irritatingly selfish man, with a streak of cruelty well camouflaged by his outward amiable ways. His hatchet job on Havig’s article, for instance, had not been an expression of scholarly dissent as much as it had been an attack on a philosophy of life that called his own hedonistic ways into question. His relationship with his wife, too, he saw with uncomfortable clarity: it was not that he was not “born” to be a good husband, but simply that he had not been willing to work at it. She was no shrew, merely a woman who wanted to share her husband’s inner life and had been shut completely away from it.

  Bernard stared steadily ahead. This close confinement, away from the lulling influences of his cozy nest at home, had forced him in on himself, compelled him to take a healing look at the real self enclosed in a shell of complacency.

  Earth was in for the same kind of rough awakening, Bernard thought. He wondered if the people in general would profit from the jolt of truth, as he felt he had, or if they would angrily throw up defense mechanisms to keep the true barb from sin
king in. Bernard frowned. He had his doubts.

  And time was running out, now. Only twelve hours remained until conversion time. The clock hands moved, slowly, inexorably.

  Ten hours.

  Eight.

  Six.

  Four.

  Twenty minutes.

  The last minutes took the longest. Bernard’s face was set in a rigid mask, his eyeballs throbbing as he watched the clock. No one had spoken in hours.

  The gongs sounded, finally, their resonance booming through the cabin like an annunciation of Judgment. The moment of conversion came. The vision screen brightened as the faster-than-light ship twisted out of the unknown void and crashed across the barrier into the familiar universe.

  The message came aft from Laurance, in slow, measured tones. “We’re crossing the orbit of Neptune at this moment, heading inward. I’ve radioed ahead to Earth and they got the message. They know we’re coming home.”

  SIXTEEN

  The private chamber of the Technarch McKenzie had a harsh, almost hieractic simplicity, with its black stone walls and its bright, shimmering marble floor. The windowless chamber had been designed to impress both its occupant and his visitors with the somber importance of the Technarch’s responsibilities—and in that it succeeded, Martin Bernard thought. He felt a tinge of something quite like awe as he followed McKenzie in.

  Few words had been interchanged since the landing of the XV-ftl in Central Australia an hour before. The wanderers had come forth; and perhaps the Technarch had seen from their tense, bleak faces that the news they bore was not to be blurted out hastily. In any event, he had asked no questions, merely nodded a Technarchical greeting as the men left the ship. Bernard had come up to him.

  “Hearkening, Excellency.”

  “Hello, Bernard. What news?”

  “Might I report to Your Excellency in your private chambers?”

  The audience had been granted. One by one, stepping through the transmat, they had crossed the gap from the spacefield to the Archonate Center. Now Dominici, Stone, and Havig waited in the Technarch’s antechamber, while Bernard, alone, faced McKenzie within.

  The Technarch slipped into his seat behind his broad, bare-topped desk and gestured to Bernard to sit facing him. Glad to get off his shaky legs, Bernard took the seat. He knew what he was going to say, but tension gripped him all the same.

  He stared levelly at the Technarch’s face. At the dark, brooding eyes, the thick hump of a nose, the wide, tightly clamped lips, the jutting chin, the corded neck. McKenzie seemed to have the strength of a bull. Bernard wondered how much of that strength McKenzie was going to need in order to withstand the blow that was coming.

  “You wish to report to me, Dr. Bernard. Very well. I’m extremely interested in learning how your voyage went—in detail.” The Technarch’s voice was level, well modulated, with the sharp edge of strength shaping every syllable.

  Bernard said, “I’ll begin at the beginning, then, Excellency.”

  “An excellent idea.”

  Quit stalling! Bernard told himself sharply. The Technarch’s eyes reflected impatience, mockery perhaps. In a calm voice Bernard said, “We had no technical difficulties in reaching the planet of the alien colony. We landed, observed the aliens for a while, and finally made ourselves known to them. Dr. Havig did an excellent job of teaching several of the aliens to speak Terran. They call themselves Norglans, by the way. We made it clear to them that we had come to negotiate a treaty, whereupon our Norglan contact left us and returned, some time later, with two of his superiors—larger physically and evidently much more intelligent, since they were able to absorb a week’s instruction in Terran in only a few hours, from their comrade. When they met with us, they could speak fairly well, and they improved every minute.”

  “What did they say?” McKenzie asked.

  Bernard leaned forward, knotting his hands together tensely. “We explained quite clearly to them that it was inevitable that the boundaries of our respective spheres of expansion were bound to overlap and clash, and we showed them that it was Earth’s wish to arrive at a peaceful settlement now, rather than let matters slide until the actual collision came, and with it war.”

  “Yes? And how did they react?”

  “Badly. They listened to what we had to say, and then they presented a counter-proposal: that Earth confine itself to the worlds already colonized, leaving all the rest for Norgla.”

  “What?” Fury blazed in the Technarch’s eyes. “Of all the preposterous nonsense! You mean they simply told you to agree to an end of all Terran expansion? That we abdicate as a galactic power?”

  Bernard nodded. “That was precisely the way they put it. The galaxy was theirs; we would be allowed to keep the worlds we had already taken, but no more.”

  “And you rejected this insanity, of course.”

  “We didn’t get the chance to.”

  “What?”

  “The two Norglan ambassadors hurled their ultimatum and walked out—went back to their home planet. Evidently they have the equivalent of transmat travel between worlds of their system too, Excellency. We protested to the colony supervisor, but he said he could do nothing; the ambassadors had left, and would not be returning. So the talks broke down. We blasted off for Earth.”

  McKenzie goggled incredulously. Spots of color appeared on his cheeks; his nostrils widened in suppressed rage. “You realize what this ultimatum means. We’re at war with these creatures after all, despite everything…”

  Bernard held up one hand, fighting to keep it steady. “Your pardon, Excellency. I haven’t finished telling of our journey.”

  “There’s more?”

  “Much more. You see, we became lost trying to return home. Commander Laurance and his men spent hours trying to get us back on course, but there was nothing they could do. We emerged from no-space, finally, in the region of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.” Bernard felt a band of tightness in his stomach. The words rolled glibly from his lips, though he knew each one drove a maddening wedge deep into the Technarch’s mind. “We were lost, fifty thousand parsecs from Earth, and no way of returning. But suddenly our ship was taken over by an irresistible force. We were drawn down to a planet in the Magellanic Cloud, inhabited by beings that identified themselves as the Rosgollans. Strange beings—with wonderful mental powers. Teleportation, psychokinesis, and many other abilities. They—read our minds. Interrogated us. Found out about our mission to the Norglans. And then—then they brought the two Norglan ambassadors across space to meet with us again.”

  The Technarch’s facial expression had been changing all during Bernard’s last few sentences. Now McKenzie seemed to be staring silently off into a void, face growing pale, eyes glazed and reflective.

  “Go on,” the Technarch said in a terribly quiet voice.

  “The Rosgollans staged a kind of courtroom scene—examining our claims, dismissing them. The Norglans got indignant, so the Rosgollans humiliated them—levitated them, let them hang in the air, dropped them in a heap. It was a demonstration of unmatchable power. And after it was over—after the Rosgollans had shown us we could not hope to question their orders—they divided the galaxy into Terran and Norglan spheres.”

  “Divided it?”

  “Yes. Here—I have the chart on a flat projection. It’s a line that runs right through the heart of our galaxy. Everything on this side is ours; everything on the other side, Norglan. And if either side crosses the boundary line, or if we leave the confines of our galaxy, the Rosgollan scouts will discover it and administer punishment.”

  The Technarch took the star-chart from Bernard with a leaden hand, looked at it for an instant, shoved it roughly to one side. He seemed to sigh.

  “You aren’t—making all this up, Bernard?”

  “No, Excellency. It’s all true. The Rosgollans are out there, half a million years cleverer than we are—and they hinted that there were other races even more powerful, in the distant reaches of the universe.”

&nb
sp; “And we have to keep in line— like small boys in school— Norglans over here, Terrans over there—while the Rosgollans make sure we don’t get out of step. Is that it?” The Technarch’s face became a mask of rigid anguish. He leaned forward, gripping the top of his desk with big, powerful hands. He squeezed the desk top, closing his eyes, grimacing with inner torment.

  Something shattered inside the Technarch. His shoulders seemed to slump; his face sagged, the wide mouth drooped, the massive forearms lost their strength and dangled limply. Bernard stared at the floor. Watching McKenzie break in this instant was like watching a monument tumble to destruction; it was painful to see.

  When McKenzie spoke again, it was in a different voice, with none of the metallic inner strength of his Technarch tone. “I guess this expedition didn’t work out so well, then. I sent you out as representatives of the finest race in the galaxy—and you come back defeated— crushed…”

  “But we got what we went for, after all!” Bernard protested. “You sent us out to divide the galaxy with the Norglans—and we succeeded in that!”

  The sophistry sounded hollow the moment he had uttered it. McKenzie smiled strangely. “You succeeded? I sent you out to divide the universe; you came back with half a galaxy apportioned to you. It’s not the same thing at all, is it, Bernard?”

  “Excellency…”

  “So all my dreams are over. I thought in my lifetime I’d see Terrans ranging the farthest reaches of the universe— and instead we’re hemmed into half a galaxy, by the mercy of our masters. And that’s the end, isn’t it, Bernard? Once a limit has been set, once someone puts a fence around us— that ends all our dreams of infinity.”

  “No, Excellency! That’s where you’re wrong!”

  “Eh?” McKenzie asked, startled. It was probably the first time since he had assumed the mantle of the Technarchonate that anyone had so flatly contradicted him. But now he had hardly the strength to be angry.

  Bernard said, “This isn’t the end, Excellency. I admit we aren’t in the same position of supremacy we were in before Laurance discovered the Norglans— but we never were in that position of supremacy! We never were the lords of creation. It only seemed that way, because we’d never come across any other race. Now, for the first time, we see our true position.