"Blind luck some hysterical type didn't decide your people attacked Earth, bust in and shoot you," Donnan told him.
The man felt collected enough now to stuff and light a pipe. Through the smoke veil, he considered the Monwaingi. Yeh, he thought, they're for sure prettier than humans, but you have to see them to realize it. In words, they sound like cartoon figures. About five feet tall, the short avian body was balanced on two stout yellow legs. (The clawed toes could deal a murderous kick, Donnan had observed; the Monwaingi were perhaps more civilized than man, but there was nothing Aunt Nelly about them.) The arms, thinner and weaker than human, ended in hands whose three fingers, four-jointed and mutually opposed, were surprisingly dextrous. The head, atop a long thick neck, was large and round, with a hooked beak. A throat pouch produced a whole orchestra of sounds, even labials. There was a serene grace in Ramri's form and stance; the Greeks would have liked to sculpture him. (Athens went down into a pit of fire.) But all you could really convey in words was the intense blueness of the feathers, the white plumage of tail and crest. Ramri didn't wear anything but a pouch hung from the neck, nor did he need clothes.
He plucked at the thong, miserable, looked toward Donnan and away. "I heard somewhat," he began. His tone died out in a sigh like violins. "I am so grieved." He leaned an arm on the bulkhead and his forehead on the arm, as a man might. "What can I say? I cannot even comprehend it."
Donnan started to pace, back and forth, back and forth. "You got no idea, then, what might have happened?"
"No. Certainly not. I swear—"
"Never mind, I believe you. What usually causes this sort of thing?"
Ramri pulled his face around to give Donnan a blank look. "Causes it? I do not snatch your meaning."
"How do other planets get destroyed?" Donnan barked.
"They don't."
"Huh?" Donnan stopped short. "You mean . . . no. In all the war and politicking and general hooraw throughout the galaxy—it's got to happen sometimes."
"No. Never to my knowledge. Perhaps occasionally. Who can know everything that occurs? But never in our purview of history. Did you imagine—Carl-my-friend, did you imagine my Society, any Society of Monwaing, would have introduced a planet to such a hazard? A . . . sumdau thaungwa—a world?" Ramri cried. "An intelligent species? An entire destiny?"
He staggered back to his framework and collapsed. A low keening began in his throat and rose, while he rocked in the seat, until the cabin rang. Even through the alien tone scale, Donnan sensed such mourning that his flesh crawled. "Stop that!" he said, but Ramri didn't seem to hear.
Was this the Monwaingi form of tears? He didn't know. There was so bloody much the human race didn't know.
And never would, probably.
Donnan beat one fist against the bulkhead. It was coming home to him too, forcing its way past every barrier he could erect, the full understanding of what had been done. Maybe so far he'd been saved from shivering into pieces by the habit of years, tight situations, violence, and death from New Mexico to New Guinea, Morocco to the Moon—and beyond—but habit was now crumpling in him too and presently he'd ram the pistol barrel up his mouth.
Or maybe, a remote part of him thought, he'd had less to lose than men like Goldspring and Wright. No wife waiting in a house they'd once painted together, no small tangletops asking for a story, not even a dog any more. There'd been girls here and there, of course. And Alison. But she'd quit and gone to Reno, and looking back long afterward he'd understood the blame was mostly his fiddlefooted own . . . and, returning from three years among strange suns, he had daydreamed of finding someone else and making a really honest try with her. But as the barriers came down, he saw there would be no second chance, not ever again, and he started to break as other men on the ship had broken.
Until suddenly he realized he was feeling sorry for himself. His father had taught him that was the lowest emotion a man could have. If nothing else, the impoverished rancher had given this to his son. (No, much more: horses and keen sunlight, sagebrush and blue distances and a Navajo cowboy who showed him how to stalk antelope—but all those things were vapors, adrift above growling emptiness.) The pipestem broke between Donnan's teeth. He knocked the bowl out most carefully and said:
"Someone did the job, I reckon. Not too long ago, either. Assuming only the superficial rocks were melted and the oceans didn't boil clear down to the bottom, it shouldn't take more than several months to cool as far as our bolometers indicate. Eh? So what's been going on in this neck of the galaxy while we were away? Guess, Ramri. You'd be more at home with interstellar politics than any human. Could the Kandemir-Vorlak war have reached this far?"
The Monwaingi cut off his dirge as if with a knife. "I do not know," he said in a thin voice, like a hurt child. (Oh, God-who-doesn't-give-a-hoot, the children never knew, did they? The end came too fast for them to feel, didn't it?) "I do not believe so. And in any event . . . would even Kandemir have been so . . . pagaung . . . and why? What could anyone gain? Planets have sometimes been bombarded into submission, but never—" He sprang to his feet. "We did not know, we of Monwaing!" he stammered. "When we discovered Earth, twenty years ago—when we began trading and you began learning and, and, and—we never dreamed this could happen!"
"Sure," said Donnan softly. He went over and took the avian in his arms. The beaked, crested head rested on the man's breast and the body shuddered. Donnan felt the panic of total horror recede in himself. Someone aboard this bolt-bucket has to keep off his beam ends for a while yet, he thought. I reckon I can. Try, anyway.
"Hell, Ramri," he murmured, "men have lived with more or less this possibility since they touched off their first atomic bomb, and that was—when? Forty-five, fifty years ago? Something like that. Since before I was born. So finally it's happened. But thanks to you, we had spaceships when it did. A few. There must be a few other Earth ships knocking around in the galaxy. Russian, Chinese . . . they say at least one of those was coeducational. The Europeans were building two when the Franklin left. There was talk of crewing one with women. Damnation, chum, maybe we'd all be finished, in one of our home-grown wars, if your people hadn't showed up. Maybe you've given us a chance yet. Anyhow, you Monwaingi weren't the only ones in space. Somebody from Kandemir or Vorlak or some other planet would have dropped in on Sol within a few years if you hadn't. Galactic civilization was spreading into this spiral arm, that's all. Now come on, wipe your eyes or blow your nose or twiddle your fingers or whatever your people do. We've got work ahead of us."
He felt the warmth—the Monwaingi had a higher body temperature than his—steal into him, as if he drew strength from this being. Ramri was viviparous, but had been nursed on food regurgitated by his parents; he breathed oxygen, but the proteins of his body were dextrorotatory where Donnan's were levorotatory; he could live in a terrestroid ecology, but only after he had been immunized against dozens of different allergens; he came from a technologically advanced planet, but the concepts of his civilization could hardly be put into human terms. And yet, Donnan thought, we aren't so different in what matters.
Or are we?
He didn't let himself stiffen, outwardly, but he stood for a while weighing the possibility in a mind turned cold. And then the siren blew again, and Strathey's voice filled the ship: "Battle stations! Prepare for combat! Three unidentified objects approaching, six o'clock low. They seem to be nuclear missiles. Stand by for evasive action and combat!"
II
It is the business of the future to be dangerous.
—Whitehead
Ramri was out the door before the announcement was repeated. Though human space pilots were competent enough, there were as yet none who had grown up with ships, like him and his fathers through the past century and a half. The thousand subtleties of tradition were lacking. In an emergency, Ramri took the control board.
Donnan stared after him, wrestled with temptation, and lost. He, a plain and civilian mechanical engineer, had no right to be on the
bridge. But what he'd lately seen there made him doubt if anyone else did either. Not that he figured himself for a savior; he just wanted to be dealt in. With a shrug, he started after the Monwaingi.
They didn't notice him, where he stopped by the door. Ramri had taken over the main pilot chair, a convertible one adjusted to his build. Captain Strathey and Goldspring, the detector officer—apparently recovered from the initial shock—flanked him. Bowman stood near the middle of the room, prepared to go where needed. A good bunch of boys, Donnan thought. A threat to their lives was the best therapy for this moment anyone could have offered them.
His eyes searched the ports. Earth had already shrunk to view, the horror was not visible, but the cool blue-green color he remembered from three years ago was now grayish white, sunlight reflected off stormclouds. Luna hung near, a pearl, unchanged and unchangeable. Off to one side, its radiance stopped down by the screen, the sun disc burned within outspread wings of zodiacal light. And beyond and around lay space, totally black, totally immense, bestrewn with a million wintry stars. He realized with a shudder how little difference Ragnarok had made.
But where were the missiles? Goldspring, hunched over his instruments, was sensing them by radar and nuclear emission and the paragravitic pulses of their engines. They should have approached faster than this. The lumbering Franklin could not possibly out-accelerate a boat whose only payload was a hydrogen warhead.
"Yes, three, I make it," Goldspring said tonelessly. "When can we go into superlight?"
"Not soon," Ramri answered. "The nearest interference fringe must be several A.U. from here." He didn't need to calculate with the long formulas involved; a glance at Sol, an estimate of fluctuation periods, and he knew. "I suggest we—yes—"
"Don't suggest," said Strathey tightly. "Order."
"Very well, friend." The Monwaingi voice sang a string of figures. Three-fingered hands danced over the keyboard. A set of specialized computers flashed the numbers he asked for. He threw a strong vector on the ship's path and, at the proper instant, released a torpedo broadside with the proper velocities.
Donnan sensed nothing except the shift in star views, until a small, brilliant spark flared and died sternward. "By the Lord Harry, we got one!" Goldspring exclaimed.
We shouldn't have, Donnan thought. Space missiles should be able to dodge better than that.
The ship thrummed. "I believe our chance of hitting the other two will improve if we let them come nearer," Ramri said. "They are now on a course only five degrees off our own; relative acceleration is low."
"How did they detect us, anyway?" Bowman asked.
"The same way we detected them," Goldspring answered. "Kept instruments wide open. Only they are set to home on any ship they spot."
"Sure, sure. I just wondered . . . I was off the bridge for a while. . . . Was radio silence broken? Or—" Bowman wiped his brow. It glittered with sweat, under the cold fluorescent panels.
"Certainly not!" Strathey clipped.
An idea nudged Donnan. He cleared his throat and stepped forward. The exec gaped at him, but left Strathey to roar: "What are you doing here? I'll have you in irons for this!"
"Had a notion, sir," Donnan told him. "Here we got a chance to learn something. And at no extra risk, since we've already been spotted."
The captain's face writhed. Red and white chased each other across his cheeks. Then something seemed to drain from him. He slumped in his chair and muttered, "What is it?"
"Throw 'em a radio signal and see if they respond."
"They're not boats with crews aboard," Goldspring protested. "Our receivers have been kept open. Boats would have called us."
"Sure, sure. I was just wondering if those critters were set to home on radio as well as mass and engine radiation."
Goldspring looked hard at Donnan. The detector officer was a tall man, barely on the plump side, with bearded fleshy features that had been good-humored. Now his eyes stared from black circles. He had had a family too, on Earth.
Suddenly, decisively, he touched the transmitter controls. The blips on his radar screen, the needles on other detection instruments, and the three-dimensional graph in the data summary box, all wavered before firming again. Donnan, who had come close to watch, nodded. "Yep," he said. "Thought so."
Given the additional stimulus of a radio signal, the blind idiot brains guiding the missiles had reacted. So powerful were the engines driving those weapons that the reaction had showed as a detectable slight change of path, even at these velocities. Then the missile computers decided that the radio source was identical with the object which they were attacking, and resumed pursuit.
"Yes," Ramri said gravely, "they are programmed to destroy communicators as well as ships. In a word, anything and everything in this neighborhood that does not give them a certain signal. . . . Stand by! Fire Nine, Eight, Seven on countdown." He rattled off coordinates and accelerations. Elsewhere in the ship, the torpedo-men adjusted their weapons, a task too intricate to be handled directly from the bridge. "Five, four, three, two, one, zero!"
The torps sprang forth. At once Ramri hauled back on his controls. Even a paragrav craft could not maneuver like an airplane, but he did his best, cramming force into an orthogonal vector until Donnan heard an abused framework groan. Flame bloomed, not a hundred miles away. The screens went temporarily black at that monstrous overload. As they returned to life, the third missile passed within yards.
There was time for men to glimpse the lean shape, time even for Strathey to press a camera button. Then it had vanished. Donnan exhaled in a gust. That had been too close for comfort.
He stared at the dispersing gas cloud where the torpedoes had nailed the second missile. The incandescent wisp was quickly gulped by surrounding darkness. Goldspring nodded at his instruments. "Number Three'll be back shortly, when it's braked the speed it's got."
"I'm surprised it didn't come closer," Donnan remarked. Keep this impersonal, he thought, keep it a problem in ballistics, don't imagine the consequences if that thing zeroes in on us. No use thinking about those consequences, anyway. You'd never feel them.
"I am also," Ramri declared. "I was not overly hopeful of our escaping. This ship is not designed for combat. Whoever programmed those missiles did a poor job."
"Did a good enough job on Earth," Bowman grated.
"Shut up!" Strathey's voice was very quiet.
"Stand by." Ramri's orders trilled forth. A final time, nuclei burst in space . . . so close that Donnan felt the gases buffet the Franklin, like a shock through his feet and into his bones, a clang and rattle that slowly toned itself away.
"Whew!" He shook his head, trying to clear it.
"How much radiation did we get that time?" Strathey asked.
"Does that matter?" Bowman replied, high-pitched and with a giggle. "We're none of us married."
Goldspring jerked in his seat. His eyes closed and he gripped the chair arms till his knuckles whitened. The viewscreen crowned his head with stars.
"Be quiet." Strathey's nostrils twitched. "Be quiet or I'll kill you."
"I'm s-sorry," Bowman stuttered. "I only—I mean—"
"Be quiet, I said!"
Goldspring relaxed like a sack of meal. "Forget it," he mumbled. "Not enough radiation to matter. The force screens can block a lot more than that." He went to work resetting his detectors.
Ramri extended one thin hand. "Let me see the pictures you took, if your pleasure be so," he requested. Strathey didn't seem to hear. Donnan brought the self-developing film out. One frame was pretty clear, even showing details of the missile's drive coils.
Ramri stared at it a long while. The stillness grew and grew.
"Recognize the make?" Donnan inquired at last.
"Yes," Ramri breathed. "I believe so." He mumbled something in his own language. "Even of them," he added, "I hate to believe this."
"Kandemir?"
"Yes. A Kandemirian Mark IV Quester. I have inspected some that were obtained by
the Monwaingi intelligence service. They are standard anti-ship missiles."
"Kandemir," Strathey whispered. "My God—"
"Wait a bit, skipper," Donnan urged. "Let's not jump to conclusions."
"But—"
"Look, sir, everything I've read and heard suggests to me that those missiles ought to have wiped us out. They should've dodged everything we could throw at them and hit us broadside on. We aren't a warship; our armament was for swank, and because the Pentagon insisted a ship headed into unknown parts of the galaxy should have some weapons. Ramri, you were puzzled too, weren't you, by our escape?"
"What is your meaning, Carl-my-friend?" The troubled golden eyes searched Donnan's whole posture.
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