Invaders From Earth

by Robert Silverberg

  “You look as if you’ve been guillotined,” Spalding said, as Kennedy came in. “They didn’t fire you!”

  “No such luck. I’ve got a great big opportunity. The Corporation’s offering me a three-week trip to Ganymede to get the feel of things.”

  A sudden flicker of eagerness came into Spalding’s lean face. It was an ugly look, as if Spalding had realized that he would be in charge, doing second-level work, all the time Kennedy was gone. “You’re accepting, of course?”

  Kennedy grimaced. “If I’m buffaloed into it. But I’m sure Marge will howl. She hates to be left alone even for one night. And three weeks—”

  “She can’t go with you?”

  “There’s just one passage available. I’d be leaving on Thursday if I accept. But that would leave you in charge of the project, wouldn’t it?”

  “I can handle it.”

  “I know you can. But suppose you pick the time I’m gone to have another attack of ethics? Suppose you walk out while I’m up in outer space, and leave the project flat? What’s Watsinski going to do—say all communications with Ganymede have been suddenly cut off, and wait for me to get back to patch up the damage?”

  Spalding’s lips tightened. “I told you I didn’t plan any walkouts. I can’t afford to quit yet. I haven’t shown any signs of it in the last five weeks, have I? I’ve been working like a dog on this project.”

  “I’m sorry, Dave. I had a rough weekend. I didn’t mean to come down on you like that. Let’s get to work.”

  He pulled down one of the big loose-leaf volumes they had made up. They had written out detailed biographies of each of the three hundred and thirteen colonists with whom they had populated Ganymede, and each morning they picked a different one to feature in the newsbreaks.

  “I think it’s time to get Mary Walls pregnant,” Kennedy said. “We haven’t had a pregnancy on Ganymede yet. You have the medical background Rollins dug up?”

  Spalding produced a slim portfolio bound in black leather—a doctor’s report on possible medical problems in the colony. Childbirth under low gravity, pressure diseases, things like that.

  Spalding typed out a press release about the first pregnancy on Ganymede, with quotes from the happy mother-to-be, the stunned prospective father (“Gosh, this is great news! I know my Ma back in Texas will jump up and clack her heels when she finds out about Mary!”) and, of course, from the ever-talkative Director Brookman.

  While he worked, Kennedy checked the photo file for a snapshot of Mary Walls—agency technicians had prepared a phony composograph of every member of the colony— and readied it for release with Spalding’s newsbreak. He added the day’s news to the Colony Chronicle he was writing—excerpts were being printed daily in the tabloids— and wrote a note to himself to remember that a maternity outfit would need to be ordered before Thursday for Mrs. Walls, to be shipped up on the next supply ship.

  Thought of the supply ship brought him back to his own predicament. Dammit, he thought, I don’t want to go to Ganymede!

  It had gotten to the point where he believed in his colony up there. He could picture slab-jawed Director Brookman, an outwardly fierce, inwardly sentimental man, could picture rosy-cheeked Mary Walls being told by mustachioed Dr. Hornsfall that she was going to be blessed with a child—

  And it was all phony. The outpost on Ganymede consisted of a couple of dozen foul-smelling bearded spacemen, period. He didn’t want to go there.

  He realized that Spalding could handle the project perfectly well without him. It was running smoothly, now; the news sources were open and well oiled, the populace was hooked, the three hundred and thirteen colonists had assumed three dimensions not only in his mind but in Spalding’s and in the rest of the world’s. The colony had a life of its own now. Spalding would merely have to extend its activities day by day in his absence.

  They phoned in the pregnancy story before noon, and got busy sketching out the next day’s work. Spalding was writing Director Brookman’s autobiography, to be serialized in some big weekly—they were still pondering bids— while Kennedy blocked in succeeding events in Mary Walls’ pregnancy. He toyed momentarily with the idea of having her suffer a miscarriage in about two months’ time, but rejected it; it would be good for a moment’s pathos, but quickly forgotten. Having her stay pregnant would be more effective.

  Near closing time the reaction hit him, as it did every day toward the finish. He sat back and stared at his trembling hands.

  My God, he thought, this is the biggest hoax humanity has ever known. And I originated it.

  He estimated that perhaps fifty people were in on the hoax now. That was too many. What if one of them cracked up and spilled it all? Would they all be lynched?

  They would not, he answered himself. The thing was too firmly embedded in reality by now. He had done his job too well. If someone—anyone—stood up and yelled that it was all a fake, that there was no colony on Ganymede, it would be a simple matter to laugh it down as crackpottery and go ahead manufacturing the next day’s set of press releases.

  But still the enormity of it chilled him. He looked at Spalding, busily clacking out copy, and shuddered. By now the afternoon telefax sheets were spewing forth the joyous news that Mary Walls—petite little Mary Walls, twenty-five, red-haired, a colony dietician, married two years to lanky Mike Walls, twenty-nine, of Houston, Texas—was about to bear young.

  He clenched his fists. Where did it stop, he wondered? Was anything real?

  Was he, he wondered, just part of a fictitious press release dreamed up by some glib public relations man elsewhere? Did Mary Walls, up there on Ganymede, know that she was a cardboard figure being manipulated by a harrowed-looking man in New York, that her pregnancy had been brought about not by her loving husband’s caress but by a divine gesture on the part of one Theodore Kennedy?

  He wiped away sweat. A heavy fist thundered on their glassite cubicle and he looked up to see Alf Haugen grinning at him.

  “Come on, geniuses. It’s closing time and I want to get out of here!”

  They locked away their books and the car-pool people assembled. Kennedy dropped them each off at their destinations, and finally swung his car into his own garage.

  Marge had his afternoon cocktail ready for him. He told her about Bullard’s visit, about Dinoli’s offer. “So they want to send me to Ganymede for three weeks, and I’d be leaving Thursday? How d’you like that!”

  She smiled. “I think it’s wonderful! I’ll miss you, of course, but—”

  His mouth sagged open. “You think I’m going to accept this crazy deal?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “But I thought—” He closed his eyes a moment. “You want me to go, Marge?”

  “It’s a grand opportunity for you, dear. You may never get another chance to see space. And it’s safe, isn’t it? They say space travel is safer than riding in a car.” She laughed. It was a brittle laugh that told Kennedy a great many things he did not want to know.

  She wants me to go, he thought. She wants to get rid of me for three weeks.

  He took a deep, calm sip. “As a matter of fact, I have until Wednesday to make up my mind,” he said. “I told them I’d have to discuss the matter with you before I could agree to anything. But I guess it’s okay with you.”

  Her voice cracked a little as she said, “I certainly wouldn’t object. Have I ever stood in the way of your advancement, Ted?”

  9

  The ship left at 1100 sharp on Thursday, July 5, 2044, and Ted Kennedy was aboard it.

  The departure went smoothly and on schedule. The ship was nameless, bearing only the number GC-1073; the captain was a gruff man named Hills who did not seem pleased at the prospect of ferrying a groundlubber along with him to Ganymede. Blast-off was held at Spacefield Seven, a wide jet-blasted area in the flatlands of New Jersey that served as the sole spaceport for the eastern half of the United States.

  A small group of friends and well-wishers rode out with Kenn
edy in the jetcab to see him off. Marge came, and Dave Spalding, and Mike Cameron, and Ernie Watsinski. Kennedy sat moodily in the corner of the cab, staring downward at the smoke-stained sky of industrialized New Jersey, saying nothing, thinking dark thoughts.

  He was not looking forward to the trip at all.

  Space travel, to him, was still something new and risky. There had been plenty of flights; space travel was forty years old and far from being in the pioneering stage. There had been flights to Mars and Venus, and there was a thriving colony of engineers living in a dome on Luna. Captain Hills had made the Ganymede run a dozen times in the past year. But still Kennedy was nervous.

  He was being railroaded. They were all conspiring, he thought, all the smiling false friends who gathered around him. They wanted to send him off to the airless ball of ice halfway across the sky.

  The ship was a thin needle standing on its tail, very much alone in the middle of the vast, grassless field. Little trucks had rolled up around it; one was feeding fuel into the reaction-mass hold, one was laden down with supplies for the men of the outpost, another carried mail— real mail, not the carnival-inspired fakery Kennedy had seen on World Holiday—for the men up there.

  The ship would carry a crew of six, plus cargo. The invoices listed Kennedy as part of the cargo.

  He stood nervously at the edge of the field, watching the ship being loaded and half-listening to the chatter of his farewell committee. A tall gaunt-looking man in a baggy gray uniform came up to them and without waiting for silence said, “Which one of you is Kennedy?”

  “I am.” It was almost a croak.

  “Glad to know you. I’m Charley Sizer, ship’s medic. Come on with me.”

  Kennedy looked at his watch. “But it’s an hour till blastoff time.”

  Sizer grinned. “Indeed it is. I want to get you loaded up with gravanol so acceleration doesn’t catch you by surprise. When that big fist comes down you won’t like it. Let’s go, now—you’re holding up the works.”

  Kennedy glanced around at the suddenly solemn little group and said, “Well, I guess this is it. See you all three weeks from now. Ernie, make sure my paychecks get sent home on time.” He waited a couple of seconds more. “Marge?” he said finally. “Can I get a kiss good-bye?”

  “I’m sorry, Ted.” She pecked at his lips and stepped back. He grinned lopsidedly and let Sizer lead him away.

  He clambered up the catwalk into the ship. It was hardly an appealing interior. The ship was poorly lit and narrow; the companionways were strictly utilitarian. This was no shiny passenger ship. Racks of spacesuits hung to one side; far to the front he saw two men peering at a vastly complex control panel.

  “Here’s where you’ll stay,” Sizer said, indicating a sort of hammock swung between two girders. “Suppose you climb in now and I’ll let you have the gravanol pill.”

  Kennedy climbed in. There was a viewplate just to the left of his head, and he glanced out and saw Marge and Watsinski and the others standing far away, at the edge of the field, watching the ship. Sizer bustled efficiently around him, strapping a safety-webbing over him. The gaunt medic vanished and returned a few minutes later with a water flask and a small bluish pill.

  “This stuff will take all the fret out of blast-off,” Sizer explained. “We could hit ten or fifteen g’s and you wouldn’t even know it. You’ll sleep like a babe.” He handed the pill to Kennedy, who swallowed it, finding it tasteless, and gulped water. Kennedy felt no internal changes that would make him resistant to gravity.

  He rolled his eyes toward the right. “Say—what happens if there’s an accident? I mean, where’s my spacesuit? I ought to know where it is, in case—”

  Sizer chuckled. “It takes about a month of training to learn how to live inside a spacesuit, brother. There just isn’t any sense in giving you one. But there aren’t going to be any accidents. Haven’t they told you space flight’s safer than driving a car?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing. The ship’s in perfect order. Nothing can go wrong. You’ve got Newton’s laws of physics working on your side all the way from here to Ganymede and back, and no crazy Holiday drivers coming toward you in your own lane. Just lie back and relax. You’ll doze off soon. Next thing you know, we’ll be past the Moon and Ganymede-bound.”

  Kennedy started to protest that he wasn’t sleepy, that he was much too tense to be able to fall asleep. But even as he started to protest, he felt a wave of fatigue sweep over him. He yawned.

  Grinning, Sizer said, “Don’t worry, now. See you later, friend.” He threaded his way forward.

  Kennedy lay back. He was securely webbed down in the acceleration hammock; he could hardly move. Drowsiness was getting him now. He saw his watch dimly and made out the time as 1045. Fifteen minutes to blast-off. Through the port he saw the little trucks rolling away.

  Sleep blurred his vision as the time crawled on toward 1100. He wanted to be awake at the moment of blast-off, to feel the impact, to see Earth leap away from them with sudden ferocity. But he was getting tired. I’ll just close my eyes a second, he thought. Just catch forty winks or so before we lift.

  He let his eyelids drop.

  A few minutes later he heard the sound of chuckling. Someone touched his arm. He blinked his eyes open and saw Medic Sizer and Captain Hills standing next to his hammock, looking intently at him.

  “There something wrong?” he asked in alarm.

  “We just wanted to find out how you were doing,” Hills said. “Everything okay?”

  “Couldn’t be better. I’m loose and relaxed. But isn’t it almost time for blast-off?”

  Hills laughed shortly. “Yeh. That’s a good one. Look out that port, Mr. Kennedy.”

  Numbly Kennedy swiveled to the left and looked out. He saw darkness, broken by bright hard little dots of painful light. At the bottom of the viewplate, just barely visible, hung a small green ball with the outlines of Europe and Asia still visible. It looked like a geographical globe. At some distance away hung a smaller pockmarked ball.

  Everything seemed frozen and terribly silent, like a Christmas-card scene.

  In a hushed voice Kennedy said, “Are we in space?”

  “We sure are. You slept through the whole thing, it seems. Blast-off and null-g and everything. We’re a half-day out from Earth. From here till Ganymede it’s all a pretty placid downhill coast, Mr. Kennedy.”

  “Is it safe to get out of this cradle?” he asked.

  Hills shrugged. “Why not?”

  “I won’t float, or anything?”

  “Three hours ago we imparted spin along the longitudinal axis, Mr. Kennedy. The gravity in here is precisely one g Earth-norm. If you’re hungry, food’s on in the galley up front.”

  He ate. Ship food—packaged synthetics, nourishing and healthfully balanced and about as tasty as straw briquettes. He ate silently and alone, serving himself; the rest of the men had already had their midday meal.

  Four of them were playing cards in the fore cubicle that looked out onto the stars. Kennedy was both shocked and amused when he stepped through the unlocked door and saw the four of them, grimy and bearded, dressed in filthy fatigue uniforms, squatting around an empty fuel drum playing poker with savage intensity, while five feet away from them all the splendor of the skies lay unveiled.

  He had no desire to break into the game, and they ignored him so thoroughly that it was clear he was not invited. He turned away, smiling. No doubt after you made enough trips, he thought, the naked wonder of space turned dull on you, and poker remained eternally fascinating. The sight of an infinity of blazing suns was finite in its appeal, Kennedy decided. But he himself stared long and hard at the sharp blackness outside, broken by the stream of stars and by the distant redness of what he supposed was Mars.

  Mars receded. Kennedy thought he caught sight of ringed Saturn later in the day. Hours passed. He ate again, slept, read.

  Two days went by, or maybe three. To the six men of the crew, he w
as just a piece of cargo—ambulatory, perhaps, but still cargo. He read several books. He let his beard grow until the stubbly shoots began to itch fiercely, and then he shaved it off. Once he started to write a letter to Marge, but he never finished it. He wished bitterly he had brought Watsinski or Dinoli or Bullard along to live on this cramped ship and see Ganymede at first hand.

  Even he grew tired of the splendor of the skies. He remembered a time in his boyhood when an uncle had given him a cheap microscope, and he had gone to a nearby park and scooped up a flask of stagnant water. For days he had stared in open-mouthed awe at paramecia and fledgling snails and a host of ciliated creatures, and then the universe in the drop of water had merely given him eye-strain and, bored with his host of creatures, he had impatiently flushed them down the drain.

  It was much the same here. The stars were glorious, but even sheer glory palls at length. He could meditate only so long on the magnitude of space, on the multiplicity of suns, on the strange races that might circle red Antares or bright Capella. The vastness of space held a sheerly emotional kind of wonder for him, rather than intellectual, and so it easily became exhausting and finally commonplace. He turned away from the port and returned to his books.

  Until finally great Jupiter blotted out the sky, and Sizer came by to tell him that the icy crescent sliver he saw faintly against the mighty planet’s bulk was their destination, Ganymede.

  Again he was strapped into the cradle—the deceleration cradle, now; a mild semantic difference. A second time he took a pill, and a second time he slept. When he woke, some time later, there was whiteness outside the port—the endless eye-numbing whiteness of the snowfields of Ganymede.

  It was day—“day” being a ghostly sort of half-dusk, at this distance from the sun. Kennedy knew enough about the mechanics of Ganymede from his pseudo-colony work of the past month to be aware that a Ganymedean day lasted slightly more than seven Earth days, the length of time it took Ganymede to revolve once about Jupiter—for Ganymede, like Earth’s Moon, kept the same face toward its primary at all times.