And presently the flashes grew infrequent. The threads of vapor which led to each grew longer. In a little while they came from halfway around the planet. Then squad ships appeared even there. And immediately pin points of intolerable brilliance destroyed them—yet never as fast as they appeared.
Finally there came ten seconds in which no atomic flame ravened in emptiness. One more glitter. Fifteen seconds. Twenty. Thirty seconds without a flashing of atomic explosive—
The surviving objects which appeared to be squad ships hung in space. They moved without plan. They swam through space without destination. Presently the most unobservant of watches must have perceived that their movement was random. That they were not driven. That they had no purpose. That they were not squad ships but targets—and not even robot targets—set out for the missile rockets of the Huk planet to expend themselves on.
The missile rockets had expended themselves.
So Sergeant Madden opened communication with the Huks.
* * * *
“These Huks,” observed Sergeant Madden as the squad ship descended to the Huk planet’s surface, “they must’ve had a share in the scrapping eighty years ago. They’ve got everything the old-time Huks had. They’ve even got recordings of human talk from civilian human prisoners of years gone by. And they kept somebody able to talk it—for when they fought with us!”
Patrolman Willis did not answer. He had a strange expression on his face. At the moment they were already within the Huk home-planet’s atmosphere. From time to time a heavily accented voice gave curt instructions. It was a Huk voice, telling Patrolman Willis how to guide the squad ship to ground where—under truce—Sergeant Madden might hold conference with Huk authorities.
“Hold the course,” said the voice. “That is r-right. Do as you are.”
The horizon had ceased to be curved minutes ago. Now the ground rose gradually. The ground was green. Large green growths clustered off to one side of the flat area where the ship was to alight. They were the equivalent of trees on this planet. Undoubtedly there were equivalents of grass and shrubs, and seed-bearing and root-propagating vegetation, and Huks would make use of some seeds and roots for food. Because in order to have a civilization one has to have a larger food-supply than can be provided by even the thriftiest of grazing animals. But the Huks or their ancestors would need to have been flesh-eaters also, for brains to be useful in hunting and therefore for mental activity to be recognized as useful. A vegetarian community can maintain a civilization, but it has to start off on meat.
A clump of ground-cars waited for the squad ship’s landing. The ship touched, delicately. Sergeant Madden rumbled and got out of his chair. Patrolman Willis looked at him uneasily.
“Huh!” said Sergeant Madden. “Of course you can come. You want them to think we’re bluffing? No. Nothing to fight with. The Huks think our fleet’s set to do the fighting.”
He undogged the exit door and went out through the small vestibule which was also the ship’s air lock. Patrolman Willis joined him out-of-doors. The air was fresh. The sky was blue. Clouds floated in the sky, and growing things gave off a not-unpleasant odor, and a breeze blew uncertainly. But such things happen on appropriate planets in most sol-type solar systems.
* * * *
Huks came toward them. Stiffly. Defiantly. The most conspicuous difference between Huks and humans was of degree. Huks grew hair all over their heads, instead of only parts of it. But they wore garments, and some of the garments were identical and impressive, so they could be guessed to be uniforms.
“How-do,” said the voice that had guided the ship down. “We are r-ready to listen to your message.”
Sergeant Madden said heavily:
“We humans believe you Huks have got a good fleet. We believe you’ve got a good army. We know you’ve got good rockets and a fighting force that’s worth a lot to us. We want to make a treaty for you to take over and defend as much territory as you’re able to, against some characters heading this way from the Coalsack region.”
Silence. The interpreter translated, and the Huks muttered astonishedly among themselves. The interpreter received instructions.
“Do you mean others of our r-race?” he demanded haughtily. “Members of our own r-race who r-return to r-recover their home worlds from humans?”
“Hell, no!” said Sergeant Madden dourly. “If you can get in contact with them and bring them back, they can have their former planets back and more besides—if they’ll defend ’em. We’re stretched thin. We didn’t come here to fight your fleet. We came to ask it to join us.”
More mutterings. The interpreter faced about.
“This surpr-rises us,” he said darkly. “We know of no danger in the direction you speak of. Per-rhaps we would wish to make fr-riends with that danger instead of you!”
Sergeant Madden snorted.
“You’re welcome!” Then he said sardonically: “If you’re able to reach us after you try, the offer stands. Join us, and you’ll give your own commands and make your own decisions. We’ll co-operate with you. But you won’t make friends with the characters I’m talking about! Not hardly!”
More hurried discussions still. The interpreter, defiantly: “And if we r-refuse to join you?”
Sergeant Madden shrugged.
“Nothing. You’ll fight on your own, anyhow. So will we. If we joined up we could both fight better. I came to try to arrange so we’d both be stronger. We need you. You need us.”
* * * *
There was a pause. Patrolman Willis swallowed. At five-million-mile intervals, in a circle fifty million miles across with the Huk world as its center, objects floated in space. Patrolman Willis knew about them, because he and Sergeant Madden had put them there immediately after the missile rockets ceased to explode. He knew what they were, and his spine crawled at the thought of what would happen if the Huks found out. But the distant objects were at the limit of certain range for detection devices. The planet’s instruments could just barely pick them up. They subtended so small a fraction of a thousandth of a second of arc that no information could be had about them.
But they acted like a monstrous space fleet, ready to pour down war-headed missiles in such numbers as to smother the planet in atomic flame. Patrolman Willis could not imagine admitting that such a supposed fleet needed another fleet to help it. A military man, bluffing as Sergeant Madden bluffed, would not have dared offer any terms less onerous than abject surrender. But Sergeant Madden was a cop. It was not his purpose to make anybody surrender. His job was, ultimately, to make them behave.
The Huks conferred. The conference was lengthy. The interpreter turned to Sergeant Madden and spoke with vast dignity and caginess:
“When do you r-require an answer?”
“We don’t,” grunted Sergeant Madden. “When you make up your minds, send a ship to Varenga III. We’ll give you the information we’ve got. That’s whether you fight with us or independent. You’ll fight, once you meet these characters! We don’t worry about that! Just…we can do better together.” Then he said: “Have you got the co-ordinates for Varenga? I don’t know what you call it in your language.”
“We have them,” said the interpreter, still suspiciously.
“Right!” said Sergeant Madden. “That’s all. We came here to tell you this. Let us know when you make up your minds. Now we’ll go back.”
He turned as if to trudge back to the squad ship. And this, of course, was the moment when the difference between a military and a cop mind was greatest. A military man, with the defenses of the planet smashed—or exhausted—and an apparent overwhelming force behind him, would have tried to get the Cerberus and its company turned over to him either by implied or explicit threats. Sergeant Madden did not mention them. But he had made it necessary for the Huks to do something.
They’d been shocked to numbness by the discovery that humans knew of their presence on Sirene IV. They’d been made aghast by the brisk and competent nullification of their
eighty-gee rocket defenses. They’d been appalled by the appearance of a space fleet which—if it had been a space fleet—could have blasted the planet to a cinder. And then they were bewildered that the humans asked no submission—not even promises from them.
There was only one conclusion to be drawn. It was that if the humans were willing to be friendly, it would be a good idea to agree. Another idea followed. A grand gesture by Huks would be an even better idea.
“Wait!” said the interpreter. He turned. A momentary further discussion among the Huks. The interpreter turned back.
“There is a ship here,” he said uneasily. “It is a human ship. There are humans in it. The ship is disabled.”
Sergeant Madden affected surprise.
“Yeah? How come?”
“It ar-rived two days ago,” said the interpreter. Then he plunged. “We br-rought it. We have a mine on what you call Pr-rocyron Three. The human ship landed, because it was disabled. It discovered our ship and our mine there. We wished to keep the mine secret. Because the humans had found out our secret, we br-rought them here. And the ship. It is disabled.”
“Hm-m-m,” said Sergeant Madden. “I’ll send a repair-boat down to fix whatever’s the matter with it. Of course you won’t mind.” He turned away, and turned back. “One of the solar systems we’d like you to take over and defend,” he observed, “is Procyron. I haven’t a list of the others, but when your ship comes over to Varenga it’ll be ready. Talk our repair-boat down, will you? We’ll appreciate anything you can do to help get the ship back out in space with its passengers, but our repair-boat can manage.”
He waved his hand negligently and went back to the squad ship. He got in. Patrolman Willis followed him.
“Take her up,” said Sergeant Madden.
The squad ship fell toward the sky. Sergeant Madden said satisfiedly:
“That went off pretty good. From now on it’s just routine.”
* * * *
There was a bubble in emptiness. It was a large bubble, as such things go. It was nearly a thousand feet in diameter, and it was made of multipoly plastic which is nearly as anomalous as its name. The bubble contained almost an ounce of helium. It had a three-inch small box at one point on its surface. It floated some twenty-five million miles from the Huk planet, and five million miles from another bubble which was its identical twin. It could reflect detector-pulses. In so doing it impersonated a giant fighting ship.
Something like an hour after the squad ship rose from Sirene IV, a detonator-cap exploded in the three-inch box. It tore the box to atoms and initiated a wave of disintegration in the plastic of the bubble. The helium bubble-content escaped and was lost. The plastic itself turned to gas and disappeared.
The bubble had been capable of exactly two actions. It could reflect detector-pulses. In doing so, it had impersonated a giant fighting ship, member of an irresistible fleet. It could also destroy itself. In so doing, it impersonated a giant fighting ship—one of a fleet—going into overdrive.
In rapid succession, all the bubbles which were members of a non-existent fighting fleet winked out of existence about Sirene IV. There were a great many of them, and no trace of any remained.
The last was long gone when a small salvage ship descended to the Huk home planet. A heavily accented voice talked it down.
The salvage ship landed amid evidences of cordiality. The Huks were extremely co-operative. They even supplied materials for the repair job on the Cerberus, including landing rockets to be used in case of need. But they weren’t needed for take-off. The Cerberus had been landed at a Huk spaceport, which obligingly lifted it out to space again when its drive had been replaced.
* * * *
And the squad ship sped through emptiness at a not easily believable multiple of the speed of light. Sergeant Madden dozed, while Patrolman Willis performed such actions as were necessary for the progress of the ship. They were very few. But Patrolman Willis thought feverishly.
After a long time Sergeant Madden waked, and blinked, and looked benignly at Patrolman Willis.
“You’ll be back with your wife soon, Willis,” he said encouragingly.
“Yes, sir.” Then the patrolman said explosively: “Sergeant! There’s nothing coming from the Coalsack way! There’s nothing for the Huks to fight!”
“True, at the moment,” admitted Sergeant Madden, “but something could come. Not likely—But you see, Willis, the Huks have had armed forces for a long time. They’ve glamour. They’re not ready to cut down and have only cops, like us humans. It wouldn’t be reasonable to tell ’em the truth—that there’s no need for their fighting men. They’d make a need! So they’ll stand guard happily against some kind of monstrosities we’ll have Special Cases invent for them. They’ll stand guard zestful for years and years! Didn’t they do the same against us? But now they’re proud that even we humans, that they were scared of, ask them to help us. So presently they’ll send some Huks over to go through the Police Academy, and then presently there’ll be a sub-precinct station over there, with Huks in charge, and…why…that’ll be that.”
“But they want planets—”
Sergeant Madden shrugged.
“There’s plenty, Willis. The guess is six thousand million planets fit for humans in this galaxy. And by the time we’ve used them up, somebody’ll have worked out a drive to take us to the next galaxy to start all over. There’s no need to worry about that! And for immediate—does it occur to you how many men are going to start getting rich because there’s a brand-new planet that’s got a lot of things we humans would like to have, and wants to buy a lot of things the Huks haven’t got?”
Patrolman Willis subsided. But presently he said:
“Sergeant…what’d you have done if they hadn’t told you about the Cerberus?”
Sergeant Madden snorted.
“It’s unthinkable! We waltzed in there, and told them a tale, and showed every sign of walkin’ right out again without askin’ them a thing. They couldn’t even tell us to go to hell, because it looked like we didn’t care what they said. It was insupportable, Willis! Characters that make trouble, Willis, do it to feel important. And we’d left them without a thing to tell us that was important enough to mention—unless they told us about the Cerberus. We had ’em baffled. They needed to say something, and that was the only thing they could say!”
He yawned.
“The Aldeb reports everybody on the Cerberus safe and sound, only frightened, and the skipper said Timmy’s girl was less scared than most. I’m pleased. Timmy’s getting married, and I wouldn’t want my grandchildren to have a scary mother!”
He looked at the squad ship’s instruments. There was a long way yet to travel.
“A-h-h-h! It’s a dull business this, overdrive,” he said somnolently. “And it’s amazing how much a man can sleep when everything’s in hand, and there’s nothing ahead but a wedding and a few things like that. Just routine, Willis. Just routine!”
He settled himself more comfortably as the squad ship went on home.
LONG AGO, FAR AWAY (1959)
CHAPTER 1
The sky was black, with myriads of stars. The ground was white. But it was not really ground at all, it was ice that covered everything—twenty miles north to the Barrier, and southward to the Pole itself, past towering mountains and howling emptiness and cold beyond imagining.
The base was almost buried in snow. Off to one side of the main building a faint yellowish glow was the plastic dome of the meteor-watch radar instrument. Inside Brad Soames displayed his special equipment to a girl reporter flown down to the Antarctic to do human-interest articles for not-too-much-interested women readers.
All was quiet. This seemed the most unlikely of all possible places for anything of importance to happen.
There was one man awake, on stand-by watch. A radio glowed beside him—a short-wave unit, tuned to the frequency used by all the bases of all the nations on Antarctica—English, French, Belgian, Danish, Russian.
The stand-by man yawned. There was nothing to do.
* * * *
“There’s no story in my work,” said Soames politely. “I work with this wave-guide radar. It’s set to explore the sky instead of the horizon. It spots meteors coming in from space, records their height and course and speed, and follows them down until they burn up in the air. From its record we can figure out the orbits they followed before Earth’s gravity pulled them down.”
The girl reporter was Gail Haynes. She nodded, but she looked at Soames instead of the complex instrument. She wore the multi-layer cold-weather garments issued for Antarctica, but somehow she did not look grotesque in them. Now her expression was faintly vexed. The third person in the dome was Captain Estelle Moggs, W. A. C., in charge of Gail’s journey and the public-relations angle generally.
“I just chart the courses of meteors,” repeated Soames. “That’s all. There is nothing else to it.”
Gail shook her head, watching him.
“Can’t you give me a human angle?” she asked. “I’m a woman. I’d like to be interested.”
He shrugged, and she said somehow disconsolately:
“What will knowing the orbits of meteors lead to?”
“Finding out some special meteor-orbits,” he said drily, “might lead to finding out when the Fifth Planet blew itself up.—According to Bode’s Law there ought to be a planet like ours between Mars and Jupiter. If there was, it blew itself to pieces, or maybe the people on it had an atomic war.”
Gail cocked her head to one side.
“Now, that promises!” she said. “Keep on!”
“There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, in a certain orbit,” he told her. “There isn’t. Instead, there’s a lot of debris floating around. Some is as far out as Jupiter. Some is as far in as Earth. It’s mostly between Mars and Jupiter, though, and it’s hunks of rock and metal of all shapes and sizes. We call the big ones asteroids. There’s no proof so far, but it’s respectable to believe that there used to be a Fifth Planet, and that it blew itself up or was blown up by its inhabitants. I’m checking meteor-orbits to see if some meteors are really tiny asteroids.”
The Murray Leinster Megapack Page 171