The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One

by Aldiss, Brian

  The three occupants of the ship were rocked back on their acceleration couches for only a few seconds. Then Allan Cunliffe got up, strolled casually over to the port and gazed out. Nobody would guess from his composed face that the ship had just embarked on a hazardous mission.

  ‘At once you begin to live,’ he said, looking down at the world with a kind of pride.

  His friend, Tyne Leslie, nodded in an attempt at agreement. It was the best, at the moment, that he could do. Joining Allan, he too looked out.

  Already, he observed wonderingly, the mighty panorama of sunset was only a red stain on a carpet below them; Sumatra lay across the equator like a roasting fish on a spit. Outside: a starry void. In his stomach: another starry void.

  At once you begin to live … But this was Tyne’s first trip on the spy patrol; living meant extra adrenalin walloping through his heart valves, the centipede track of prickles over his skin, the starry void in the lesser intestine.

  ‘It’s the sort of feeling you don’t get behind an office desk,’ he said. Chalk one up to the office desk, he thought.

  Allan nodded, saying nothing. His silences were always positive. When the rest of the world was talking as it never had before, Allan Cunliffe remained silent. Certainly he had as many mixed feelings about the Rosks as anyone else on Earth: but he kept the lid on them. It was that quality as much as any other that had guaranteed a firm friendship between Allan and Tyne, long before the latter followed his friend’s lead and joined the Space Service.

  ‘Let’s get forward and see Murray,’ Allan said, clapping Tyne on the back. Undoubtedly he had divined something of the other’s feelings.

  * * *

  The scout was small, one of the Bristol-Cunard ‘Hynam’ line, a three-berth job with light armament and Betson-Watson ‘Medmenham X’ accelerators. The third member of the team, its leader, was Captain Murray Mumford, one of the first men ever to set eyes on the Rosks, four years ago.

  He grinned at the other two as they came into the cabin, set the autopilot, and turned round to face them.

  ‘Luna in five and a fraction hours,’ he said. Once you had seen Murray, you would never forget him. Physically he was no more and no less than a superb specimen of broad-shouldered manhood. Five minutes with him convinced you that he had that extraordinary persuasive ability which, without a word being said, could convert potential rivals into admirers. Tyne, always sensitive to the currents of human feeling, was aware of this magnetic quality of Murray’s; he distrusted it merely because he knew Murray himself was aware of it and frequently used it to his own advantage.

  ‘Well, what’s the picture?’ he asked, accepting a mescahale from Allan, trying to appear at ease.

  ‘With any luck, we’ll have a pretty quiet job for your first live op,’ Murray replied, as they lit their mescahales. ‘The target area, as you know, is Luna Area 101. Luna Intelligence reports a new object outside one of the Roskian domes. It’s small and immobile – so far, at any rate. It’s outside a dome on the southern perimeter of Area 101, which means it is fairly accessible from our point of view.’

  ‘What’s the state of light there now, Murray?’ Allan asked.

  ‘Sundown in Grimaldi, which contains Area 101, was four hours ago. Intelligence suspect the Rosks may be planning something under cover of darkness; we have imposed a lot of shipping restrictions on their Earth–Luna route lately. So our orders are to slip in from the night side and investigate – obviously without being seen, if possible. Just a quick look over, personal inspection in spacesuits. We should not be out of the ship for more than twenty minutes. Then we streak for home again, heroes all.’

  The starry void blossomed up again in Tyne’s midriff. Action; this was what he feared and what he wanted. He looked at the lunar map Murray carelessly indicated. One small square of it, low in the third quadrant covering Grimaldi, had been shaded yellow. This was Area 101. Beside it, in the same yellow crayon, one word had been written: Rosk.

  Tyne noticed Murray studying his face intently, and turned away, ‘World Government made a great mistake in allowing the Rosks a base away from Earth,’ he said.

  ‘You were the diplomat when Allan and I were just squaddies in the Space Service,’ Murray said, smiling. ‘You tell us why Area 101 was conceded to them.’

  ‘The official reason given,’ Allan said, stepping in to back up his friend, ‘was that while we were being kind to aliens we could not expect a space-travelling race to be pinned to one planet; we were morally obliged to cede them a part of Grimaldi, so that they could indulge in Earth–Moon flight.’

  ‘Yes, that was the official face-saver,’ Tyne agreed. ‘Whenever it is beaten on any point of an agenda, World Government, the United Nations Council, declares itself “morally obliged”. In actual fact, we had rings made round us. The Rosks are so much better at argument and debate than we are, that at first they could talk themselves into anything they wanted.’

  ‘And now the Space Service sorts out the results of the politicians’ muddle,’ Murray said. It sounded slightly like a personal jibe; Tyne could not forget he had once been in politics; and in his present state of tension, he did not ignore the remark.

  ‘You’d better ask yourself how fine a job the SS is doing, Murray. Human–Roskian relations have deteriorated to such an extent this last year, that if we get caught in Area 101, we may well precipitate a war.’

  ‘Spoken like a diplomat!’ Murray exclaimed sarcastically.

  * * *

  The three of them spent most of the next four and a half hours reading, hardly speaking at all.

  ‘Better look alert. Put your books away,’ Murray said suddenly, jumping up and returning to the cabin.

  ‘Don’t mind Murray; he often behaves like a muscle-bound schoolmaster,’ Allan said laughing.

  Not often, Tyne admitted to himself without bothering to contradict his friend aloud. Murray had drunk with them several times at the Madeka Hotel in Sumatra; his manner then had been far from schoolmasterly. He thought of Murray knocking back carioka till the early hours, rising later to eat with a monstrous appetite, while Allan and Tyne beside him pushed away at the large unappetising breakfasts the hotel provided.

  The immediate present eclipsed Tyne’s thoughts as the great black segment of moon slid up at them. It was like falling into a smile-shaped hole. Radar-guided, the scout became a tiny, moving chip of a ship again, instead of a little world in its own right.

  A few lights gleamed far ahead: Rosk lights, shining up from Area 101.

  ‘Strap in!’ Murray said, over the intercom.

  They were braking. As deceleration increased, it felt as if they were plunging through water, then soup, then treacle, then wood. Then they weren’t plunging at all. They were featherlight. With a bump, they stopped. They were down.

  ‘All change; please have your alien identity cards ready!’ said Allan. Tyne wondered how he was feeling, even as Allan smiled reassuringly at him.

  Murray left the cabin, walking with something like a swagger. He was pleasantly excited. For him, this was the simple life, with no cares but the present one.

  ‘The radar-baffle’s on,’ he said. ‘No signs of alarm from our friends outside. Let’s get into our suits as fast as possible.’

  They climbed into the spacesuits. The process took half an hour, during which Tyne sweated freely, wondering all the while if their ship had been sighted by Rosk lookouts. But there was no alternative. The spacesuit is a tool; a bulky, complex, hazardous, pernickety tool for surviving where one is not meant to survive. It needs endless adjustment before it can be trusted. There was not a spacer in the system who did not hate spacesuits, or envy the Rosks their immeasurably superior variety.

  At last they had lashed, strapped, dogged and screwed each other into place. Three monstrous robots bumbled round slowly in the confined space, nearly filling the ship with their bulk; they made with slow, underwater gestures for the hatch. Five minutes later, they were all standing on the luna
r surface in complete darkness.

  In what were already regarded as the old palmy days, before the Rosks arrived in the system, Tyne had frequently been up to the moon, on pleasure and business. He was not prepared for how bleakly uninviting the place appeared now. In the Grade-A darkness, Grimaldi was a desert of frozen soot.

  ‘We’ve something less than half a mile to the target dome,’ Murray said, his voice a whisper in the headsets. ‘Let’s move!’

  They saw by infra-red extensions. Murray led them along by the crater edge, treading round spines of out-cropping debris. The alien domes became visible as black breasts against sequin-studded silk. Through the little grille of his suit window, Tyne saw the world as a plaster mock-up of a reality too unreal ever to be true. He himself was a pigmy imprisoned in the iron bowel of a robot heading for destruction. Fighting off that irrational sensation, he peered ahead for the strange object they had come to investigate.

  Something lay ahead. It was impossible to see what it was. Tyne touched Allan’s arm. The latter swung round, and then turned in the direction in which Tyne pointed. Murray paused, making a clumsily impatient gesture to them to come on. Perhaps he feels vulnerable as I do, Tyne thought, sympathetically, pointing again through the blackness for Murray’s benefit.

  Next second, they were bathed in the ashy glare of a searchlight, skewered neatly in mid-gesture.

  The light came not from the domes ahead, but to one side, from a point by the crater wall. Tyne just stood there, blinded, knowing they were trapped.

  ‘Drop!’ Allan shouted.

  ‘Shoot the light out!’ Murray said. His great metal-claw went down piston-fashion to the service pistol, came up levelling the cumbrous weapon, jerked with the recoil. Allan and Tyne heard the shots only as vibrant thuds through Murray’s suit mike.

  He got the light. It cut off – but already another beam was striking out from the nearest dome, swerving and sending an oval across the ash towards them. Probably they were being fired at, Tyne thought detachedly; you would not know until you were hit. He had his pistol out and was firing too, rather wildly, but towards where the enemy attack would come from.

  ‘Here they come! Make for the ship, Tyne!’ Allan bellowed.

  As the new searchlight swamped them, Tyne caught a glimpse of moving forms. The Rosks had been lying in wait for them. Then a hammerblow struck his shoulder, sending illuminated pain like a crazy neon system all over his body. Gasping, he heard his suit creak with all the abandon of a falling tree. He was going over … and as he went, he had a jigsaw puzzle, upside-down, glimpse of approaching Rosks.

  * * *

  When the Rosks had arrived in the solar system four and a half years before, one unambitious day in March, 2189, an epoch ended, though comparatively few people realised it at the time, Man’s time of isolation was over. No longer could he regard himself as the only sentient being in the universe. On his doorstep stood a race superior to him scientifically if not morally.

  The shock of the Roskian arrival was felt most severely in those countries which for several centuries had been accustomed to regarding themselves as the world’s rulers, or the arbiters of its conduct. They were now in the position of a school bully, who, looking carefully over his shoulder, finds the headmaster standing over him.

  The Rosks came in one mighty ship, and a quarter of the world’s population quaked in fear; another quarter cheered with excitement; the wiser half reserved judgement. Some of them, four and a half years later, were still reserving judgement. The Rosks were no easier to sum up than Earthmen.

  Superficially, a Rosk resembled a man. Not a white man but, say, a Malayan. Their appearance varied from one to another, but most of them had light brown skins, no bridge to their noses, dark eyes. Their body temperature was 105.1 degrees, a sign of the hotter planet from which they came.

  When the Rosks arrived, Tyne Leslie was the youngest second secretary to an under-secretary to the Under-Secretary of the British Corps of the United Nations Council. He had witnessed the endless fluttering in ministerial dovecotes that went on all over the world as the realities of the Rosk–Man situation became apparent. For the true situation emerged only gradually, while language barriers were being broken down. And the true situation was both complicated and unpleasant.

  Man learnt something of the impasse from a yellow-haired Rosk, Tawdell Co Barr, who was one of the first Roskian spokesmen on the UNC.

  ‘Our mother ship,’ he explained, ‘is an interstellar vessel housing four interplanetary craft and something more than five thousand of our people, male and female. Most of them are colonists, seeking only a world to live in. We have come from a world you would call Alpha Centauri II; ours is the first interstellar voyage ever made from that beautiful but overcrowded planet. We came to Sol, our nearest neighbour in the vastness of space, seeking room to live – only to find that its one habitable planet is already swarming with men. Although we are happy to meet another sentient race, the depth of our disappointment otherwise cannot be measured: our journey, our long journey, has been in vain.’

  ‘It’s a civil speech,’ Tyne commented, when he heard it. And other civil speeches followed, each revealing at least one awkward fact about the Rosk visit.

  To begin with, these facts almost passed unnoticed among the general run of humanity.

  After the first wave of shock had passed round Earth, a tide of optimism followed. The real difficulties inherent in the situation only emerged later. Rosks were heroes; most people managed successfully to hide their disappointment at the lack of bug eyes and tentacles in the visitors. Nor did they worry when Tawdell Co Barr revealed that the Roskian political system was a dictatorship under the supreme Ap II Dowl.

  Civility, in fact – an uneasy civility on Earth’s part – was the order of the day. The big ship circled Earth inside the lunar orbit, a handful of Rosks came down and fraternised, speaking either to the councillors of the UNC or over tridee to the multitude; or they visited some of the cities of Earth.

  In return for his hospitality, they presented men with microfilm books about natural and social life on Alpha Centauri II, as well as specimens of their literature and art, and preserved samples of their flora. But no Earthman was allowed to enter their ship. Scientists, politicians, celebrities, newsmen, all were politely refused admittance, and provided with acceptable explanations.

  ‘Our ship is as inviting as a charnel house,’ Co Barr admitted gravely. ‘Many of our people died on the journey here. Many are dying now, from dietary and sunlight deficiencies, or from mental illnesses brought about by lifelong incarceration. For we have been exiled for two exhausting generations in the night of space. We can go no further. All we ask, all we beg of you, in your mercy, is a place in which we may rest and recover from our ordeal.’

  A place … But what place? At first it seemed an almost impossible question; the UNC convened practically without a break for weeks on end. For the first time in centuries, all nations were united – in a determination not to allow the Rosks on to their territory.

  In the end, two decisions emerged. First, that the Rosks should be granted an Earth base. Second, where it should be.

  Both answers were inevitable. Even Tyne, from his back seat in the debate, saw them coming. In the human attitude to the Rosks lay both fear and envy; even if mercy should permit it, it was impossible to demand of the Rosks that they leave the solar system again. Such a move might provoke them to defiance of man. They might in desperation fight for the land they required. And what weapons they might possess was unknown; indeed, what gifts their science might yield upon more intimate acquaintance was a matter for general speculation.

  As for the site of the base, it had to be in an equatorial region. Earth’s equatorial belt was about as warm as Alpha II’s temperate zone. A site in the middle of Africa might be too inconvenient; a small island might prove too self-contained. The increasingly mighty nation of Brazil would tolerate no Rosks near her borders. After many squawkings, orat
ions, protests and uses of veto, an area of eighty square miles just south of Padang in Sumatra was finally ceded as a Rosk base.

  ‘For this small gift our gratitude is immeasurable,’ Ap II Dowl, making one of his rare personal visits, said. There were many who considered his choice of adjective unfortunate – or deliberate.

  So the Rosks landed on Earth in their massive ship. It soon became clear that they never intended to leave again; they had had enough of space.

  Earth was unwilling to play permanent host. The Rosks, multiplying behind a perimeter they had rapidly fortified, represented a threat no less ominous for being unformulated. Yet how to evict them? It seemed to Earth’s statesmen that the only possible line of action was to nag the Rosks into leaving.

  Unfortunately, the more they scratched the sore, the more it itched.

  Nation after nation sent its representatives into Sumatra, to see what could be seen, and to pick up any Roskian secrets, if possible. In the big UNC council chambers in Padang, Man and Rosk haggled and talked, demanded and conceded, bluffed and argued. The situation was at once funny and tragic. That old hope of profiting other than materially by the contact of two races was quite lost to view.

  Except on diplomatic errands, Earthmen were not allowed into Rosk base, Rosks were not allowed outside it – yet in practice spies on both sides infringed these laws. Padang became full of spies; nation spying against nation, race against race. The situation became more complex still when, in an attempt to ingratiate themselves, the UNC ceded the small Lunar Area 101 to the visitors, to allow them to test out their four interplanetary ships.

  ‘This move touches my heart,’ Tawdell Co Barr declared. ‘We came as strangers; you welcome us as friends. Together, Rosk and man will build a new and lasting civilisation.’

  By this time, such fair words rang hollow.

  Whether Tawdell meant it or not, the hopes he expressed were the hopes of many men, everywhere. Unfortunately, this was Tawdell’s last public speech! He disappeared into the Rosk base and was not heard of again. It was believed in diplomatic circles that the yellow-haired Rosk had been too friendly towards man for his overlords’ liking. Ap II Dowl’s dictatorship, which had been formed in the harsh environs of the ship, now took the reins. His henchmen sat at the council tables, and relations between the two sides slowly deteriorated.