We had been told not to feel any sense of blame for that one disaster, as many of the most important advances in adeledicnander electronic psychology had been made as the result of theoretical analyses of that great catastrophe.
I grew aware that Blake had flung himself disgustedly into a nearby chair.
“Boy, oh, boy,” he said, “this is going to be some life for us. We can all anticipate about fifty more years of being pariahs in a civilization where we can’t even understand how the simplest machines work.”
I stirred uneasily. I had had similar thoughts. But I said nothing. Blake went on:
“I must admit, after I first discovered the Centauri planets had been colonized, I had pictures of myself bowling over some dame, and marrying her.”
Involuntarily, my mind leaped to the memory of a pair of lips lifting up to mine. I shook myself. I said:
“I wonder how Renfrew is taking all this. He—”
A familiar voice from the door cut off my words. “Renfrew,” it said, “is taking things beautifully now that the first shock has yielded to resignation, and resignation to purpose.”
We had turned to face him by the time he finished. Renfrew walked slowly toward us, grinning. Watching him, I felt uncertain as to just how to take his built-up sanity.
He was at his best. His dark, wavy hair was perfectly combed. His startlingly blue eyes made his whole face come alive. He was a natural physical wonder; and at his normal he had all the shine and swagger of an actor in a carefully tailored picture.
He wore that shine and swagger now. He said:
“I’ve bought a spaceship, fellows. Took all my money and part of yours, too. But I knew you’d back me up. Am I right?”
“Why, sure,” Blake and I echoed.
Blake went on alone: “What’s the idea?”
“I get it,” I chimed in. “We’ll cruise all over the universe, live our life span exploring new worlds. Jim, you’ve got something there. Blake and I were just going to enter a suicide pact.”
Renfrew was smiling. “We’ll cruise for a while anyway.”
Two days later, Cassellahat having offered no objection and no advice about Renfrew, we were in space.
~ * ~
It was a curious three months that followed. For a while I felt a sense of awe at the vastness of the cosmos. Silent planets swung into our viewing plates, and faded into remoteness behind us, leaving nostalgic memory of uninhabited, wind-lashed forests and plains, deserted, swollen seas and nameless suns.
The sight and the remembrance brought loneliness like an ache, and the knowledge, the slow knowledge, that this journeying was not lifting the weight of strangeness that had settled upon us ever since our arrival at Alpha Centauri.
There was nothing here for our souls to feed on, nothing that would satisfactorily fill one year of our life, let alone fifty. Nothing, nothing.
I watched the realization grow on Blake, and I waited for a sign from Renfrew that he felt it, too. The sign didn’t come. That of itself worried me; then I grew aware of something else. Renfrew was watching us. Watching us with a hint in his manner of secret knowledge, a suggestion of secret purpose.
My alarm grew; and Renfrew’s perpetual cheerfulness didn’t help any. I was lying on my bunk at the end of the third month, thinking uneasily about the whole unsatisfactory situation, when my door opened, and Renfrew came in.
He carried a paralyzer gun and a rope. He pointed the gun at me, and said:
“Sorry, Bill. Cassellahat told me to take no chances, so just lie quiet while I tie you up.”
“Blake!” I bellowed.
Renfrew shook his head gently. “No use,” he said. “I was in his room first.”
The gun was steady in his fingers, his blue eyes were steely. All I could do was tense my muscles against the ropes as he tied me, and trust to the fact that I was twice as strong, at least, as he was.
I thought in dismay: Surely I could prevent him from tying me too tightly.
He stepped back finally, said again. “Sorry, Bill.” He added: “I hate to tell you this, but both of you went off the deep end mentally when we arrived at Centauri; and this is the cure prescribed by the psychologists whom Cassellahat consulted. You’re supposed to get a shock as big as the one that knocked you for a loop.”
The first time I’d paid no attention to his mention of Cassellahat’s name. Now my mind flared with understanding.
Incredibly, Renfrew had been told that Blake and I were mad. All these months he had been held steady by a sense of responsibility toward us. It was a beautiful psychological scheme. The only thing was: what shock was going to be administered?
Renfrew’s voice cut off my thought. He said:
“It won’t be long now. We’re already entering the field of the bachelor sun.”
“Bachelor sun!” I yelled.
He made no reply. The instant the door closed behind him, I began to work on my bonds; all the time I was thinking:
What was it Cassellahat had said? Bachelor suns maintained themselves in this space by a precarious balancing.
In this space! The sweat poured down my face, as I pictured ourselves being precipitated into another plane of the space-time continuum—I could feel the ship falling when I finally worked my hands free of the rope.
~ * ~
I hadn’t been tied long enough for the cords to interfere with my circulation. I headed for Blake’s room. In two minutes we were on our way to the control cabin.
Renfrew didn’t see us till we had him. Blake grabbed his gun; I hauled him out of the control chair with one mighty heave, and dumped him onto the floor.
He lay there, unresisting, grinning up at us. “Too late,” he taunted. “We’re approaching the first point of intolerance, and there’s nothing you can do except prepare for the shock.”
I scarcely heard him. I plumped myself into the chair, and glared into the viewing plates. Nothing showed. That stumped me for a second. Then I saw the recorder instruments. They were trembling furiously, registering a body of INFINITE size.
For one long moment I stared crazily at those incredible figures. Then plunged the decelerator far over. Before that pressure of full-driven adeledicnander, the machine grew rigid; I had a sudden fantastic picture of two irresistible forces in full collision. Gasping, I jerked the power out of gear.
We were still falling.
“An orbit,” Blake was saying. “Get us into an orbit.”
With shaking fingers, I pounded one out on the keyboard, basing my figures on a sun of Sol-ish size, gravity and mass.
The bachelor wouldn’t let us have it.
I tried another orbit, and a third, and more—finally one that would have given us an orbit around mighty Antares itself. But the deadly reality remained. The ship plunged on, down and down.
And there was nothing visible on the plates, not a real shadow of substance. It seemed to me once that I could make out a vague blur of greater darkness against the black reaches of space. But the stars were few in every direction and it was impossible to be sure.
Finally, in despair, I whirled out of the seat, and knelt beside Renfrew, who was still making no effort to get up.
“Listen, Jim,” I pleaded, “what did you do this for? What’s going to happen?”
He was smiling easily. “Think,” he said, “of an old, crusty, human bachelor. He maintains a relationship with his fellows, but the association is as remote as that which exists between a bachelor sun and the stars in the galaxy of which it is a part.”
He added: “Any second now we’ll strike the first period of intolerance. It works in jumps like quantum, each period being four hundred ninety-eight years, seven months and eight days plus a few hours.”
It sounded like gibberish. “But what’s going to happen?” I urged. “For Heaven’s sake, man!”
He gazed up at me blandly; and, looking up at him, I had the sudden, wondering realization that he was sane, the old, completely rational Jim Renfrew, made bet
ter somehow, stronger. He said quietly:
“Why, it’ll just knock us out of its toleration area; and in doing so will put us back—”
JERK!
The lurch was immensely violent. With a bang, I struck the floor, skidded, and then a hand—Renfrew’s—caught me. And it was all over.
~ * ~
I stood up, conscious that we were no longer falling. I looked at the instrument board. All the lights were dim, untroubled, the needles firmly at zero. I turned and stared at Renfrew, and at Blake, who was ruefully picking himself from the floor.
Renfrew said persuasively: “Let me at the control board, Bill. I want to see our course for Earth.”
For a long minute, I gazed at him; and then, slowly, I stepped aside. I stood by as he set the controls and pulled the accelerator over. Renfrew looked up.
“We’ll reach Earth in about eight hours,” he said, “and it’ll be about a year and a half after we left five hundred years ago.”
Something began to tug at the roof of my cranium. It took several seconds before I realized that it was my brain jumping with the tremendous understanding that suddenly flowed in upon me.
The bachelor sun. I thought dazedly. In easing us out of its field of toleration, it had simply precipitated us into a period of time beyond its field. Renfrew had said . . . had said that it worked in jumps of…four hundred ninety-eight years and some seven months and—
But what about the ship? Wouldn’t twenty-seventh century adeledicnander brought to the twenty-second century, before it was invented, change the course of history? I mumbled the question.
Renfrew shook his head. “Do we understand it? Do we even dare monkey with the raw power inside those engines? I’ll say not. As for the ship, we’ll keep it for our own private use.”
“B-but—” I began.
He cut me off. “Look, Bill,” he said, “here’s the situation: that girl who kissed you—don’t think I didn’t see you falling like a ton of bricks—is going to be sitting beside you fifty years from now, when your voice from space reports to Earth that you had wakened on your first lap of the first trip to Centaurus.”
That’s exactly what happened.
<
~ * ~
Hal Clement
COLD FRONT
The master salesman had a selling job to do in each new territory; his plan was simple, though not always easy.
~ * ~
M
aster salesman Alf Vickers walked slowly along the beach behind his companion, and pondered. He was never quite sure how to begin his talks. If it had been a question of selling, alone, he would have had no worries, even though it was necessary to employ careful reasoning rather than emotional high pressure when one was not too well acquainted with the emotional build up of an alien race; but when the selling had to be done to an entire people, and there was a moral certainty of reprimand and perhaps of disrating if the Federation Government caught him, he began to think of the consequences of his errors, before he made them.
The people, at least, were a peaceful seeming lot for such a rugged planet; that was some relief. The frowning, almost sheer six thousand feet of Observatory Hill, at whose foot he now stood, had made him think uncomfortably of the wilder mountain tribes of history and legend on Earth. Big as they were, he reflected, gazing at the specimen walking ahead of him, the few he had met were almost painfully polite. It had made easy the task of revealing nothing of himself or his mission until he had acquired a good control of their language; but courteous or not, Vickers felt that the explanation could not be put off much longer.
Serrnak Deg, who had devoted so much time to teaching his speech to the Earthman, was plainly curious; and there was only one plausible reason for his insisting that morning that they drive alone to the beach at the foot of the mountain. Plainly, he was willing to keep Vickers’ secrets from his compatriots if Vickers so wished; but he had definite intentions of learning them himself.
Vickers braced himself as Deg stopped walking and turned to face him. As the man stopped beside him, the Heklan began to talk.
“I have asked you no questions since you first intimated a desire not to answer them. I have taken you on trust, on what seemed to me a thin excuse—that you feared the results of possible misunderstanding caused by your ignorance of our language. I think my expenditure of time and effort merits some reward in the shape of satisfied curiosity.”
“The excuse was not thin,” replied Vickers in the Heklan language. “More than one man in my position has suffered injury or death as a result of just such misunderstandings. It is important that you get no false ideas from me about my people, the world from which I come, and the other races and worlds which are depending on my success. It is my intention to tell not only you, but eventually all your people, my full story; but I am depending on you for assurance that I can make myself clear, and I also want to hear your impression of what I say before it is transmitted to the rest of the planet or to that part of it with which you are on friendly terms.”
He stopped to gather his thoughts. The surroundings were not quite what he would have chosen—a rocky beach at the foot of a nearly perpendicular cliff, pounded by breakers from an ocean that was tinted a curiously disconcerting pink. The sky was a slightly deeper shade, and suspended in it was the hardly visible disk of a giant red sun.
The audience would have been more disconcerting than the environment, to one less accustomed than Vickers to nonhuman beings. Serrnak Deg had no need of the heavy jacket with which Vickers warded off the stiff breeze. He was protected by a layer of fat which must have accounted for half of his weight; and the fur that covered his body was thick enough to hide the straps supporting his only garment—a pair of trunks whose primary function was to contain pockets. His face, with its enormous eyeballs and almost nonexistent nose, reminded Vickers of a spectral tarsier; but the well-developed skull behind the grotesque features had already shown itself to contain a keen brain.
~ * ~
“One of our mapping vessels noted some time ago that this planet was inhabited by intelligent creatures,” Vickers went on. “There is a standard procedure in such cases. We learned long ago not to make immediate, open contact with the bulk of the world’s population. It is a mathematical certainty that there will be enough objection to contact with aliens to result in violence.”
“I find that hard to believe,” interjected Serrnak. “Why should there be objection?”
The Earthman creased his brows and tried to remember Deg’s word for “superstition,” but the concept had never arisen in their conversation. “There have been many reasons,” he finally answered. “The one that leaps to my mind I am still unable to express in your language. I am afraid you will have to be content with my assurance that it is so. For that reason, a single agent is always sent to contact the smallest practicable group of individuals, to become acquainted with them and through them with their people, and with their help to accustom the race gradually to the existence, appearance, and company of natives of other worlds. Make no mistake; it is a delicate task, and an error can have really ghastly results. I hope you don’t find that out first hand.”
“I don’t know about your business, but errors can be pretty serious in mine,” said Deg. “What consequence, other than this planet’s failure to join the organization you refer to as ‘We,’ can arise from mistakes of yours? I take it that you are the agent responsible for us.”
“I am; I’m sorry if I am not giving my explanations in proper order. It is my business to convince you and your fellows at this place that the Federation can do your people untold good, and to enlist your help in persuading your race, or at least your nation, to the same effect.”
“Why should persuasion be necessary?” asked Serrnak. “It seems obvious that good would result from such an action. Contact between groups living on different parts of this one world has always produced beneficial exchanges of ideas and natural products, and I should imagine that this
would be even more true of interplanetary commerce. Some planets, I suppose, would have more than enough metals, for example—that occurred to me because that is one of our most serious lacks; and certainly, if you have solved the secret of interstellar travel, there is much we can learn from you. Do you really mean to imply that some races have actually refused to benefit by such a chance?”
Vickers nodded solemnly.
“Too many,” he said. “A certain suspicion of strangers, a doubt as to our intentions, is natural of course. We expect and allow for it; our work is to allay it, and prove that we have no intention of dealing unfairly with anybody. Your attitude is encouraging; I hope a majority of your people share it. Do you suppose they will, Deg?”
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