Stetson brought himself upright, poised on the balls of his feet. “Where?”
Orne glanced out the port, returned his attention to Stetson. The electric feeling of urgency and reluctance in the bridge made his stomach churn.
“Contact ... about ten klicks out,” the speaker rasped.
“How many?”
“A mob. You want I should count them?”
“No. What’re they doing?”
“Making a beeline for us. You’d better move it.”
“Right. Keep us posted.”
“Wilco.”
Stetson looked across at his untried junior fieldman. “Orne, if you decide you want out of this assignment, you just say the word. I’ll back you to the limit.”
“Why should I want out of my first assignment?”
“Listen, and find out.” Stetson crossed to a tilt-locker beside the big translite map, hauled out a white coverall uniform with gold insignia, tossed it to Orne. “Get into these while I brief you.”
“But this is an R&R uni—”
“Get that damn uniform on your ugly frame!”
“Yes, sir, Admiral Stetson, sir. Right away, sir. But I thought I was through with old Rediscovery & Reeducation when you drafted me into the I-A.” He began changing from the I-A blue into the R&R white. Almost as an afterthought, he said: “... sir.”
A wolfish grin cracked Stetson’s big features. “You know, Orne, one of the reasons I drafted you was your proper attitude of subservience toward authority.”
Orne sealed the long seam of the coverall uniform. “Oh, yes, sir ... sir.”
“All right, knock it off and pay attention.” Stetson gestured at the translite map with its green superimposed grid. “Here we are.” He put a finger on the map. “Here’s that city we flew over on our way down.” The finger moved. “You’ll head for the city as soon as we drop you. The city’s big enough that if you hold a course roughly northeast you can’t miss it. We’re ...”
Again the call bell rang, the light flashed.
“What is it this time, Hal?” Stetson barked.
“They’ve changed to Plan H, Stet. New orders cut.”
“Five days?”
“That’s all they can give us.”
“Holy …”
“ComGo says we can’t keep the information out of High Commissioner Bullone’s hands any longer than that.”
“It’s five days then.” Stetson sighed.
Orne moved closer to the map, asked: “Is it the usual R&R foul-up?”
Stetson grimaced. “Worse, thanks to Bullone and company. We’re just one jump ahead of another catastrophe, but they still pump the Rah & Rah into the boys back at dear old Uni-Galacta.”
“It’s either go out and rediscover the lost planets or let them rediscover us,” Orne said. “I prefer the former.”
“Yeah, and we’re going to rediscover one too many someday, but this Gienah is a different breed of fish. It’s not, repeat not, a rediscovery.”
Orne felt his muscles stiffen. “Alien?”
“A-L-I-E-N,” Stetson spelled it out. “A species and a culture we’ve never before contacted. That language you were force-fed on the way out here, that’s an alien language. It’s not complete, but all we have off the minis. And we didn’t give you the basic data, what little we have, on the natives, because we’ve been hoping to scrub this place and nobody the wiser.”
“Holy mazoo! Why?”
“Twenty-six days ago an I-A sector searcher came on this planet, made a routine mini-sneaker survey. When he combed in his net of sneakers to check their data, lo and behold he had a little stranger.”
“One of theirs?”
“No, one of ours. It was a mini off the Delphinus. Rediscovery. The Delphinus has been unreported for eighteen standard months. Cause of disappearance unknown.”
“You think it cracked up here?”
“We don’t know. If it did crash on Gienah, we haven’t been able to spot it. And we’ve looked, son. Believe me, we’ve looked. And now we’ve something else on our minds. It’s the one, little item that makes me want to blot Gienah and run home with my tail between my legs. We’ve a ...” Again the call bell chimed.
“NOW WHAT?” Stetson roared.
“I’ve sneaked a mini over that mob, Stet. They’re talking about us, near as I can make out. It looks like a definite raiding party and armed.”
“What armament?”
“Too gloomy down there to be absolutely certain. The infra beam’s not working on this mini. They look like hard pellet rifles of some kind, though. Might even be off the Delphinus.”
“Can you get closer to make sure?”
“No sense risking it without the infra. Light’s very poor down there. They’re moving up fast, though.”
“Keep an eye on them, but don’t ignore the other sectors,” Stetson said.
“You think I was born yesterday?” The voice from the speaker was an angry rasping. The sound bapped off with a curt abruptness.
“One thing I like about the I-A,” Stetson said. “It collects such even-tempered types.” He stared gloomily at the white uniform on Orne, wiped a hand across his mouth as though he’d tasted something dirty.
“Why am I wearing this thing?” Orne asked.
“Disguise.”
“But where’s the mustache to go with it?”
Stetson smiled without humor. “I-A is developing its own answer to these fatkeistered politicians. We’re setting up our own search system; find the planets before they do. We’ve managed to put spies in key places at R&R. Any touchy planets our spies report, we divert the files.”
“Oh.”
“Then we look into said planets with bright boys such as yourself ... disguised as R&R.”
“Goody. And what happens if R&R stumbles onto me while I’m down there playing patty-cake with the aliens?”
“We disown you.”
“Nuts! The never ... Hey! You said an I-A ship found this place.”
“It did. Then one of our spies in R&R intercepted a routine request for an agent instructor to be assigned here with full equipment. Request signed by a First-Contact officer name of Riso ... off the Delphinus!”
“But the ...”
“Yeah, missing. The routine request was a forgery. And now you see why I’m for rubbing this place. Who’d dare forge such a request unless we knew for sure the original F-C officer was missing ... or dead?”
“Stet, what the jumped-up mazoo are we doing here?” Orne demanded. “Alien contact calls for a full team of experts with all the ...”
“This one calls for one planet-buster bomb, buster. In five days. Unless you give them a white bill in the meantime. High Commissioner Bullone will have word of this planet by then. If Gienah still exists in five days, can you imagine the fun the politicians’ll have with it? Oh, Mamma! Orne, we want this planet cleared for contact or dead before then.”
“We’re allowing ourselves to be stampeded,” Orne said. “I don’t like this. Look at what happened on ...”
“YOU don’t like it!”
“There has to be another way, Stet. When we teamed up with the Alerinoids we gained five hundred years in the physical sciences alone, not to mention the ...”
“The Alerinoids didn’t knock over one of our survey ships.”
“But what if the Delphinus crashed here? That’s a big jungle. If the locals just stumbled onto ...”
“That’s what you’re going to find out, Orne. I hope. You’re going to be the answer to their routine request, an R&R agent-instructor. But answer me this, Mister R&R, how long before a tool-using species could be a threat to the Galaxy—given the information that’s in your head?”
“You saw that city, the size of it. They could be dug in within six months and there’d be no ...”
“Yeah.”
Orne shook his head. “But think of it: two civilizations that matured along different lines. Think of all the different ways we’d approach similar problems, the lever
that’d give us for ...”
“You sound like a Uni-Galacta lecture. Are you through marching arm and arm into the misty future?”
Orne took a deep breath. He felt that he was being pushed too fast to make rational decisions. He asked: “Why me? You’re tossing me into this. Why?”
“The Delphinus master lists. You’d still be on ’em as an R&R fieldman, full identification, eye pattern, everything. That’s important if you’re masquerading as ...”
“Am I the only one you have? I’m a recent convert to I-A, but …”
“You want out?”
“I didn’t say that. I just want to know why I’m …”
“Because the bigdomes at HQ fed a set of requirements into one of their mechanical monsters. Your name popped out. They were looking for somebody capable, dependable ... and expendable.”
“Hey!”
“That’s why I’m down here briefing you instead of sitting back on a flagship. I got you into the I-A. Now, you listen carefully: If you push the panic button here without cause I will personally flay you. We both know the advantages of an alien contact. But if you get into a really hot spot and call for help, I’ll dive this cruiser into that city to get you out. Clear?”
Orne tried to swallow in a dry throat. “Yes. And thanks, Stet, but if …”
“We’ll take up a tight orbit. Out beyond us will be five transports full of I-A marines plus a Class IX Monitor with one planet-buster. You’re calling the shots, God help you! First, we have to know if they’ve taken the Delphinus, and if so, where it is. Next, we want to know how warlike these goons are. Can we deal with them? Are they too bloodthirsty? What’s their potential?”
“In five days?”
“Not a second more.”
“What do we know about them?”
“Not much. They look something like an ancient Terran chimpanzee, but with blue fur. Face is hairless, pink-skinned.” Stetson touched a button at his waist. The translite map above him became a screen with a figure frozen on it. “This is life size.”
“Looks like the famous missing link,” Orne said.
“Yeah, but you’ve a different kind of link to find.”
“Vertical slit pupil in their eyes,” Orne said. He studied the figure intently. The Gienahn had been recorded from the front by a mini-sneaker. The figure stood about a meter and a half tall. The stance was slightly bent forward, long arms hanging. The nose was flat with two vertical slits. The mouth was a lipless gash above a receding chin. Four fingers on the hands. It wore a wide belt from which dangled neat pouches and what appeared to be tools, although their use was obscure. Perhaps they were weapons. There appeared to be the tip of a tail protruding from behind one of the squat legs. The creature stood on lawn like greenery and behind it towered the faery spires of the city they observed from the air.
“Tails?” Orne asked.
“Right. They’re arboreal. Not a road on the whole planet that we can find. Lots of vine lanes through the jungle, though.” Stetson’s face hardened. “Match that with a city as advanced as the one there.”
“Slave culture?”
“Probably.”
“How many cities do they have?”
“We’ve found two. This one and another on the far side. The other one’s a ruin.”
“War?”
“You tell us. Lots of mysteries here.”
“How extensive is the jungle cover?”
“Almost complete on the land surfaces. There are polar oceans, a few lakes and rivers. One low mountain chain follows the equatorial belt about two-thirds of the way around the planet. Continental drift scars are old. The surface has been stabilized for a long time.”
“And only two cities. Are you sure of that?”
“Reasonably. It’d be pretty hard to miss something the size of that place.” He pointed to the city behind the figure on the screen. “It must be two hundred kilometers long, at least fifty wide. It’s swarming with these creatures. We’ve a good zone-count estimate; it places this city’s population at more than thirty million. In population, it’s the biggest single city we’ve ever heard of.”
“Whee-ew,” Orne breathed. “Look at the size of those buildings. What these Gienahns could tell us about urban living.”
“And we may never hear what they have to say, Orne. Unless you bring them into the fold, there’ll be nothing but ashes for our archaeologists to pick over.”
“There has to be some other way!”
“I agree, but …”
The call bell jingled.
Stetson’s voice sounded tired: “Yeah, Hal?”
“That mob’s only about five klicks out, Stet. Orne’s gear is outside in the disguised air sled.”
“We’ll be right down.”
“Why a disguised sled?” Orne asked.
“Hal’s idea. If the Gienahns think it’s a ground buggy, they may get careless when you most need an advantage. We could always scoop you out of the air, you know.”
“Stet, what’re my chances?”
“Slim. Maybe less than that. These goons probably captured the Delphinus. Our best guess is they want you just long enough to get your equipment and everything you know.”
“Only five days.”
“If you’re not out by then, we blast.”
“Expendable.”
“You want to turn down this mission?”
“No.”
“Didn’t expect you to. Look, use the back-door rule, son. Always leave yourself a way out.”
“The way you’re doing,” Orne said.
Stetson stared at him for several heartbeats, then: “Yeah. Let’s check that equipment the surgeons put in your neck.”
“I was wondering about that.”
Stetson put a hand to his own throat. His mouth remained closed, but a surf-hissing voice became audible to Orne, radiating from the implanted transceiver: “You read me, Orne?”
“I read you. Is this …”
“No!” the voice hissed. “Touch the mike contact. Keep your mouth closed. Just use your speaking muscles without speaking aloud.”
Orne obeyed, hand to throat. “How’s this?”
“That’s better,” Stetson said. “You come in loud and clear.”
“How far will this transmit?”
“There’ll be a relay sneaker close to you at all times,” Stetson said. “Now, when you’re not touching the mike contact, this rig will still feed us everything you say and everything that goes on around you. We’ll monitor everything. Got that?”
“I hope so.”
Stetson held out his right hand. “Good luck, Orne. I meant that about diving in for you. Just say the word.”
“I know the word,” Orne said. “It’s HELP!”
***
Chapter Six
Bow down to Ullua, the star wanderer of the Ayrbs. Let no blasphemy occur, nor permit a blasphemer to live. May blasphemy shrivel the mouth. Blasphemers are accursed of God and accursed of the blessed. Let this curse strike a blasphemer from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head, sleeping and waking, sitting and standing ...
—Invocation for the Day of Bairam
Gray mud floor and gloomy aisles between monstrous blue tree trunks—that was the Gienah jungle. Only the weakest glimmering of sunlight penetrated to the mud.
Orne’s disguised sled, its paragrav units turned off, lurched and skidded around buttress roots. The headlights swung in wild arcs across the trunks and down to the mud. Aerial creepers, great looping vines of them, swung down from the towering forest ceiling. A steady drip of condensation spattered the windshield, forcing Orne to use screen blowers.
In the bucket seat of the sled’s cab, Orne fought the controls while trying to watch on all sides for sign of the Gienahn raiding party. He felt plagued by the vague slow motion-floating sensations a heavy planet native always experienced in lighter gravity. It gave him an unhappy stomach.
Things skipped through the air around the lurching vehicle—
flitting and darting things, blue, red, green, violet, iridescent and dull things. Gienahn insects with fuzzy wings came in twin cones, siphoned toward the headlights. An endless chittering screeching whistling chiming tok-tok-toking sounded in the gloom beyond the sled’s lights.
Stetson’s voice hissed suddenly through Orne’s surgically implanted speaker: “How’s it look?”
“Alien.”
“Any sign of that mob?”
“Negative.”
“Right. We’re taking off. Good luck.”
From behind Orne, there came the deep rumbling roar of the scout cruiser climbing its jets. The racket receded. All other sounds hung suspended in aftersilence, then resumed: the strongest first and then the weaker.
A heavy dark object arced through the headlights, swinging on a vine. It disappeared behind a tree. Another. Another. Ghostly shadows on vine pendulums looped across both sides of the sled. Something banged down heavily on the hood.
Orne braked to a creaking stop that shifted the load behind him. He found himself staring through the windshield at a native of Gienah. The native crouched on the hood, a Mark XX exploding-pellet rifle in his right hand directed at Orne’s head. In the abrupt shock of meeting, Orne recognized the weapon: standard issue to marine guards on all R&R survey ships.
The native appeared the twin of the one Orne had seen on the translite screen, even to the belt with its pouched artifacts. The four-fingered hand looked practical and capable around the stock of the Mark XX.
Slowly, Orne put a hand to his throat, activated the hidden microphone, moved his speaking muscles: “Just made contact. One of that mob’s on the hood now. He has one of our Mark XX rifles aimed at my head.”
The surf-hissing of Stetson’s voice came through the implanted speaker: “Want us back?”
“Negative. Stand by. He looks more curious than hostile.”
“Be careful. You can’t be sure of reactions in an unknown species.”
Orne took his right hand from his neck, held it up, the palm out. He had a second thought, held up his left hand, too. Universal symbol of peaceful intentions: empty hands. The rifle muzzle lowered slightly. Orne called to mind the Gienahn language that had been hypno-forced into him. Ocheero? No, that meant ‘the People.’ Ahh ... And he recalled the heavy fricative greeting sound.
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