The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  Adam surveyed the endless hive of tiny dwelling units through which the slidewalk carried him, private cells stacked high and wide, their ranks staggered and their walls insulated in an effort to grant the occupants some diversity and privacy. On Antares Six they would have better quarters than this. There wouldn't be any outdoors there for the baby, not for some time at least, except for, as Adam had heard, a little domed-over garden. But that was really about all the outdoors you got in New New York.

  Adam dialed his private combination to let himself into the tiny apartment. He put the travel bag down and moved stealthily, hoping against hope to achieve surprise. Ready to jump at Alice the moment he spotted her, he tiptoed into the bedroom, and then the kitchen. No one.

  It was in the kitchen that he found the note.

  Darling—suddenly I can't wait to see you, so I'm going to the spaceport. If you find this,

  I've missed you, and the joke's on me for being impatient. Sit tight and I'll be home soon. Love XXXX Me

  He sat tight for an hour, savoring his impatient joy. He looked at Alice's clothes, hanging in the small closet, and touched them tenderly.

  The phone chimed.

  The screen at first showed only an official shield. Then a man's voice spoke: "Spaceport Authority. I'd like to speak to Spaceman Adam Mann, please."

  "Speaking."

  Then a man's face, the expression that it wore bringing the first cold blow of fear: "Is Alice Dexter-Mann your wife?"

  "My wife. Yes."

  "I'm sorry to tell you that there's been an accident."

  Adam afterward could never remember exactly what else the man on the videophone might have said. He raced in a nightmare through the bright anthill of the city, back to the shuttle port. Traveler's Aid. They told him where to go. In the Port-master's office, there were sudden grave, guarded looks when Adam gave his name, looks of sympathy and hidden triumph: It happened to you, not to us.

  After hearing the words several times, from two different people, he began to realize that Alice was dead. The surgeon on duty at the port said that the baby was dead too, though she had ripped it out of Alice's body, trying to save it.

  "We did all we could for her, spaceman. Sometimes it still just isn't enough…"

  A policewoman sat with Adam and talked to him calmly and gently, trying to bring him through the first shock. She tried to answer his questions. It had been a violent and deliberate attack, right in the crowded port. One suspect had been seized, but then the people who might have been witnesses had all melted away without identifying themselves.

  "These teenpacks—I don't know what the answer is, spacer. We do all we can. This year the big thing for some of them is to hunt pregnant women. Last year it was something else."

  "Who's your suspect?" Adam's stomach had turned sick and his knees weak. But still the truth hadn't really, totally, sunk in.

  "I'll show you. He's a real prize."

  The policewoman let him look through oneway glass at a young man who sat slouching on a bench. The suspect's body had grown out of adolescence. But the appearance of him, the look in his face and eyes, suggested that his mind and soul had long since ceased to grow, that now they only wriggled, caught like baby worms on some unknown fishhook. Greasy pigtails framed the masklike face. The oddly-styled leather jacket was lipstick-marked with obscene clan symbols.

  Adam opened the door of the detention room and stepped through, moving too fast for the cop beside him, who was left reaching after him with one outstretched arm. There were other police, men and women, in the detention room with the suspect, and they looked up at Adam's entrance, wondering.

  "This one did it?" Adam's knees were no longer weak.

  The sneering young mask-face held out insult like the groping hand of a blind man, trying to touch someone with it. "Sure, fatherman. I must have did whatever it was:"

  Now a large and gentle cop was standing close beside Adam, soothing him and standing in his way. "Easy now. Maybe it wasn't him at all." The other cops were standing around a communicator, going on with whatever they had been doing. But they each kept an eye out now for the bereaved young spaceman, watching him with pity and calculation, ready to lead him away if he should become violent.

  Little they knew. Adam's brain and body had absorbed the Academy training in personal combat as if he had been designed for that purpose and no other. He might have gone on to world class competition in the martial arts, except that his feelings for them had always been mixed. Arm-twisting stuff, he sometimes called that sort of activity, with a certain contempt that proceeded from a blend of distaste and fascination. What he really wanted was to be a planeteer. But before leaving the Academy Adam had acquired the ability to be more effectively violent than almost any of the instructors.

  Now the impersonal trained-in combat computer offered one of several feasible plans: three quick strides to the target, then the certain kick with the left foot, a blow with the right fist. Impacts that would break bone and crush nerves. As like as not the shock waves that the target's brain received would be enough to kill. The police were not wearing their stunguns in here; even so, their numbers and positions in the room could make it an interesting technical problem. But Adam doubted that the police would be able to stop him. The target might react to some purpose by the time he reached it. He doubted that a great deal too.

  "Come along." The large cop's gentle hand was resting on Adam's arm. "We'll find out, if it was him. We'll find out."

  The pig-tailed youth, looking at Adam, said: "C'mere, fatherman. I got a present for ya." He giggled, and made a gesture that meant nothing whatever to Adam.

  Adam waited for whatever spark it would take to set him off. Once before, as a teenager defending himself on a street near the Home, he had killed with his hands. But why had he bothered to defend himself, that time? He didn't understand it now. It had done him no good, for now his life was gone.

  He felt no reluctance to kill, but no spark came. His life was gone. His loss was beyond all paying-back, and made all action pointless. He let himself be turned around and led away. He was very tired now. It would be good to get home at last and…

  It sank in a little more. Alice was dead.

  When he did get home, there was her silent note, still waiting for him on the table.

  The Space Force looked after its own. Adam had scream-it-out grief therapy, and then for a while tranquilizers, and after that grief therapy again, this time that of a different school.

  He went on with the motions of living, and then, one day, he began to go on again with living itself.

  After a tour of duty as instructor in personal combat at the Academy, his revised orders finally came through for Antares.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Four

  The footsteps, those of one person hurrying, came to a halt just outside the messroom door. The door slid open, and the face of the courier ship's captain appeared, wearing its usual expression of faint disapproval.

  "Antares Base is on alert, gentlemen," the captain informed his two passengers; and then without waiting for an answer or comment he was gone, perpetually hurried footsteps fading.

  Adam Mann looked up and across the chessboard at his new boss, Chief Planeteer Colonel Boris Brazil, and asked: "Suppose it's just practice?"

  "I suppose." Brazil slouched in his chair, a tall, lean, blond, bony-faced man, unmoved by the news. "Or maybe something scared 'em. Maybe they heard old spit-and-polish was coming." He nodded after the courier's captain, whose way of running his ship had not earned the Colonel's respect during the days of voyaging. "Anyway, we'll soon know. I concede a draw," Brazil added, nodding cheerfully at his hopeless chess position.

  One good thing about putting the whole base on alert, thought General Grodsky, was that it at least got him up into a ship again, even if it didn't get him out from behind a desk. Nothing could do that, it seemed.

  His logistics only grew more complex when an alert was on. He then had to hold
most of his available fleet off-planet, while keeping the emergency repair facilities on the surface of Antares Six still ready to function at full capacity, as well as maintaining skeleton crews of people at the other Space Force installations around the system, all under his command. But none of this, somehow, ever cut down on what was still called paperwork. It seemed to the General that at least as much of the dataprocessing as before came shuffling its way inexorably after him, a many-tentacled monster of information; and Grodsky wound up still spending most of his time at a desk.

  The door of his inner office aboard his flagship opened now, and his secretary came in, carrying more things that he was going to have to deal with.

  The first item in his stack was something Grodsky had been looking for, and he pushed the rest aside. "Molly," he told his secretary, "get Colonel Brazil in here to me as soon as he's on board." The courier with Brazil aboard had begun to transmit its routine, official messages from Earth as soon as it appeared in normal space within reasonable radio range of Antares Base. But Grodsky wanted to hear from the Colonel the unofficial news of attitudes and rumors at home; and he wanted even more urgently to get Chief Planeteer Brazil briefed quickly on this new Fakhuri thing.

  Spaceman Adam Mann was kept waiting for several minutes in Grodsky's outer office, but the young man remained standing during that time; the fact was that he felt too keyed up to sit down. Then the inner office door, through which Colonel Brazil had already passed, opened again and a young woman in uniform stepped out. "The Colonel asked me to lure you in," she said with a tolerant smile. The impression she conveyed was that she had known the Colonel for some time, and was willing to make allowances.

  Adam marched into the inner office, where General Grodsky was sitting appropriately behind a massive desk, while Colonel Brazil meanwhile perched quite inappropriately on a corner of the same piece of furniture. Brazil hardly appeared to notice Adam's entrance; he was staring into space, as if at some new and fascinating vision that he had just been shown.

  Adam marched straight to the desk. "Spaceman Mann reporting, sir." He threw the General a sharp salute.

  Grodsky returned the gesture carelessly, but gave Adam an intent look. "At ease, Mann. Colonel Brazil thinks you can fill a vacancy in the planeteering crew of this flagship."

  "Yes sir." Adam was well aware of that, and it was exactly why he was keyed up. He hadn't thought, still didn't think, that his being given the job was really in doubt. But if the General himself was taking an interest in the matter… "I hope the Colonel's right, sir."

  In the middle of the largest relatively clear area on the General's desktop there was a personnel file; Adam recognized a permapaper copy of his own service record, which Colonel Brazil had been carrying around with him and had somehow managed to dogear slightly. Grodsky picked up the file now and began to study it. Almost immediately the General looked up with a frown. "You've had only two missions, Mann?" He turned to Brazil. "Boris, I don't know…"

  Brazil, paying attention now, was wearing one of the more subtle forms of what Adam had come to recognize as his I'm-one-up expression. "Read on a little farther, sir. One of those was the rescue job on Killcrazy."

  "Oho." The General checked the record again, and looked back at Adam with new respect. "Were you with the party that went into the crater?"

  "Yessir."

  Grodsky paged his way deeper into the record and read on. "Boris found you teaching hand-to-hand combat at the Academy. Well, that would fit the team's needs. Krishnan—the man you'd be replacing—had a high combat rating. Hm, I see you've married a Space Force lady. Congrat—oh." The general raised his eyes again. "I'm very sorry."

  "Sir, I was intending to stay in planeteering before that happened. I'm really eager to get back to it now."

  The General nodded, his eyes probing Adam's as before. Then Grodsky gestured to a chair. "Sit down, Mann. I've already told Colonel Brazil the reason for this alert we're on. Now I'm going to show both of you."

  Grodsky picked up a small control unit from his desk, and swiveled his chair. The lights dimmed in the office, and a holographic stage slid up in front of the large viewscreen that occupied most of one of the office walls. "This recording," the General announced, "was made about two standard months ago, aboard the Marco Polo 7." Adam recognized the name of a deep-space exploration ship.

  There were no titles or preliminary information at the start of the three-dimensional video recording, except the routine security classification label. Not so routine in this case—top secret. Adam hadn't yet seen many of those.

  The recording itself began with some solid-looking symbols on the stage, which he was able to recognize as representing the astrogational co-ordinates of some star system or other deep-space celestial object, no doubt those of some system that the Marco had been sent out to investigate.

  More data about the system and its chief components followed, presented in a routine symbolic form. It contained one star, a sun remarkably like Sol, whose light had been blocked from Earth since before the beginning of recorded Earthly history, by a narrow, twisted cloud of opaque interstellar dust. This Sol-like sun and its planets, all of them as yet unnamed, lay on the advancing frontier of Earth-descended humanity, right on the edge of the thirty million cubic light year volume of space which that ambitious race had somehow managed to more or less explore, marking out a small enclave within the end of one arm of the Galaxy's spiraled bulk.

  "We're skipping a lot of early details of the survey," said Grodsky in a quiet voice. "Planet Four looked very good, from a distance. Fakhuri went in for a closer investigation, according to standard operating procedure, and—well, you'll see."

  The stage now effectively placed the three men watching aboard the control bridge of the Margo 7.

  The three-dimensional picture, made in the course of routine recording of periods of key activity, was centered on a dark, intense-looking man who sat in the ship commander's acceleration chair.

  "That's Fakhuri. A good man," Grodsky commented firmly. The General paused, and then went on: "At this point, Planet Four still looked almost like a moonless twin of Earth. Which it continues to do in many ways, but… now they're launching the scoutship. Remember, Fakhuri is following survey SOP and he hasn't used any radar yet."

  Explorers going out from Earth and Earth's advanced bases had yet to encounter any aliens technologically sophisticated enough to be able to detect a radar probe. But if any such existed—and it seemed inevitable that there must, somewhere in the Galaxy—there was thought to be no point in warning them prematurely that they were under surveillance.

  As if looking over Fakhuri's shoulder aboard the Marco, now cruising some four hundred thousand kilometers from Planet Four, Adam Mann and Colonel Boris Brazil watched and listened as the scoutship, piloted by Fakhuri's Chief Planeteer, made one swing around the planet at about a hundred thousand kilometers, and another slower one at about twenty thousand. Both passes were uneventful.

  During his swing at two thousand kilometers, the Chief Planeteer who was flying the scout solo reported observing something strange on the land surface below him.

  "Like a lunar ringwall, or a half-buried foundation for a building eight or ten kilometers across," said the radio voice. "Lots of clouds there—I couldn't get a very good look."

  Fakhuri's image rubbed its dark chin. "Make a lower pass over it."

  Six seconds passed, while the finite speed of radio carried the ship commander's order on a tight beam down to the speeding scoutship, and brought the answer back.

  "Roger. Descending to six hundred klicks."

  The magnification of Fakhuri's screen showed a tiny dark scoutship creeping across the blue and green and brown of a sunlit alien continent. Then the scout almost disappeared against the background of a dark blue ocean.

  "I'm jumping forward again in time," said Grodsky. "We'll pick up the recording again—here."

  They were still observing the image as if looking over Fakhuri's sh
oulder. "Coming up toward that ringwall again," said the planeteer's voice from the little scout below. "I'll go right over it, this time. Leveling off at six hundred klicks. Should get a little atmos—"

  And that was all. The radio beam from the scout had for some reason been broken off. Fakhuri turned his head, this way and that, looking for a reason. He pressed things on his panel, trying to extract information from one instrument or another.

  Seconds later, another watcher on Fakhuri's ship cried out: "He's falling, out of control!" A closeup of another screen showed how the motion of the scout's flight had changed, from a nearly horizontal creeping to the steep curve of a dropped stone.

  "Golden! Do you read me?" Fakhuri was shouting.

  And yet another voice: "Radio beam's unlocked, sir, we can't reach him."

  "Get us right over him," ordered Fakhuri, reaching with one hand for a red stud prominent at one side of the panel before him. At the bottom of the image on Grodsky's holographic stage appeared the words: RED ALERT CALLED ABOARD MARCO POLO 7. There was justification. Scoutship drives did not fail, communications between scout and mothership simply did not break, not by accident, not just like that.

  Now, through a low cloud cover, the huge ring-wall formation on the planet's surface became partially visible in the Marco's powerful scopes. The ringwall looked like stone, perhaps once splashed molten, perhaps deliberately piled. Details were still obscure, though the starship was accelerating powerfully in normal space, very quickly getting closer to the planet.

  The screens on the Marco's bridge showed the scoutship as an almost invisible dot, tumbling toward the ringwall formation as if toward the center of a target.

  "No sign of his escape capsule."

  "Radio still out, sir."

  "Radar," Fakhuri snapped. "Track him. Planeteering, have that standby scout ready. But don't launch yet."

  Grodsky said to the onlookers in his office: "Watch now, here it comes."