Anderson, Poul - Psychotechnic League 23

by The Pirate (v1. 1)

  “No, the real anomaly is the equipment he ordered. The report on this Good Luck of his is complete enough that you can fairly well predict what a ground-preparation gang will need. The planet’s smaller than Earth, relatively cold and arid, relatively thin atmosphere. But it has a magnetic field and a weak sun; hence the radiation background is low.”

  “What is required would depend on what race is to colonize.”

  “Sure. Murdoch will sell to humans. Not Earth humans, naturally. Colonial ones, from all over. We won’t be able to monitor every embarkation and debarkation, any except a tiny fraction. Not when we are as few as we are, with so much else to do. And local authorities won’t care. They’ll be too glad to get rid of excess population. Besides, most colonials are anarchic oriented; they won’t stand for official inquiries into their business.” Trevelyan blinked in surprise. “What started me off on that?’

  “Conceivably an element of your mentation has sensed a thought.”

  “If so, it’s a hunch too faint to identify. Well. Why doesn’t he have waterfinding gear with him, drills and explosives to start forming lakes, that kind of stuff? Why does he have a full line of radiation spotters and protective suits? The biological laboratory he’s assembled isn’t right for Good Luck either; it’s meant to study life forms a lot more terrestroid. I could go on, but you get the idea.”

  “And now he has changed course.” Smokesmith considered the indicators with whatever he used to see. “A geodesic, which will bring him in the direction of Scorpius.”

  “Huh? You don’t have to ask the computer? Trouble is, no law says he must go to his announced destination, or tell us why he didn’t.” Trevelyan smiled with shut lips. “Nor does any law say we can’t tail along.”

  A keening broke from Smokesmith, made not with his vocoder but with his own tympani. It wavered up and down the scale; a brief shaken ness in his nerves told Trevelyan it entered the subsonic. Odors rolled upon the air, pungencies like blood and burnt sulfur and others men do not know.

  “Good Cosmos, what’re you doing?” he exclaimed.

  “It is an old communication of my infraculture. Of whetted winds, frost, a mountain that is a torch, beneath iron moons, a broken night, and the will to pursue that which has poison fangs . . . Enough.”

  Five hundred and twenty-eight light-years from Sol, the sky ahead suddenly blazed.

  Trevelyan had been meditating upon his philosophy. That, and reading, and listening to music tapes, and tinkering with handicrafts, and physical exercises, had been his refuge from the weary weeks. Smokesmith was a decent being in his way, but too alien for games or conversation. When asked how he passed the time, with no apparent motion save of his endlessly interweaving arms, he replied: “I make my alternate life. Your language lacks the necessary concepts.”

  The blossoming of what had been merely another, slowly waxing blue star, jerked Trevelyan to alertness. He sat up, clenched hands on chair arms, and stared at the simulacrum until his vision seemed to drown in those glittering dark depths. The star climbed in brilliance even as he watched, for Genji passed the wave front of the initial explosion and entered that which had come later. It dominated the whole sky before Trevelyan could shout:

  “Supernova!”

  And still it flamed higher, until its one searing point gave fifty times the light that full Luna does to Earth, ten million times the light of the next most luminous—and nearby—sun. Although the screens throttled down that terrible whiteness, Trevelyan could not look close to it, and his vision was fogged with shining spots for minutes after the glimpse he had first gotten.

  Smokesmith’s claws clicked on the deck of the conn section as the Reardonite entered. Trevelyan caught a hackle-raising whiff from him and knew he was equally awed. Perhaps his expressionless phrasing was a defense:

  “Yes, a supernova of Type II, if the theoretical accounts I have witnessed are correct. They are estimated to occur at the rate of one every fifty-odd years in the galaxy. The remnants of some have been investigated, but to date no outburst has been observed within the range of recorded explorations.”

  “We've gone beyond that range already,” the man whispered. He shook himself. “Is Murdoch headed toward it?”

  “Approximately. No change in course.”

  “Can’t be coincidence. He must have traveled far, looking for game the Cordys wouldn’t take from him, and—” Roughly: “Let’s get some readings.”

  Instruments, astrophysical files carried on every Service vessel, and computation produced a few answers. The star was about one hundred fifty parsecs away, which meant it had died five centuries ago. It had been a blue giant, with a mass of some ten Sols, an intrinsic luminosity of perhaps fifty thousand; but the Scorpian clouds had hidden it from early Terrestrial astronomers, and modern scientists were as yet too busy to come this far afield.

  So wild a burning could not go on for many million years. Instabilities built up until the great star shattered itself. At the peak of its explosion, it flooded forth energy equal to the output of the rest of the galaxy.

  That could last for no more than days, of course. Racing down the light-years, Trevelyan saw the lurid splendor fade. A mistiness began to grow, a nebula born of escaped gases, rich in new nuclei of the heavier elements, destined at last to enter into the formation of new suns and planets. Instruments picked out the core of the star: whitely shining, fiercer still in the X-ray spectrum, lethal to come near. But it collapsed rapidly beneath its own monstrous gravitation, to the size of a dwarf, a Jupiter, an Earth. At the end of megayears it would be so dense that nothing, not even light, could leave; and it would have vanished.

  Trevelyan said with bleak anger: “He didn’t report it. The information that’s already been lost as the wave front swelled—’’

  “Shall we return at once?” the Reardonite asked.

  “Well . . . no I suppose not. If we let Murdoch go. Cosmos knows what deviltry might happen. There’ll be other supernovas, but a dead sentience doesn’t come back.”

  “We have a strong indication of his goal.”

  “What?” Trevelyan set down the pipe he had been nervously loading.

  “Examine the photomultiplier screen, and next these.” Finger-tendrils snaked across dial faces. “The star to which I point is an ordinary G3 sun within a hundred light-years of the supernova. Proper motions show that it was somewhat closer at the time of the eruption. Our study object is on an unmistakable intercept track. It is plausible that this is meant to terminate there.”

  “But— No!” Trevelyan protested. “What can he want?”

  “The dosage received by any planet of the lesser sun, through the cosmic rays given off by the larger at its maximum, was in the thousands of roentgens, delivered in a period of days. Atmosphere and magnetic field would have provided some shielding, but the effect must nonetheless have been biologically catastrophic. Presumably, though, most lower forms of life would survive, especially vegetable and marine species. A new ecological balance would soon be struck, doubtless unstable and plagued by a high mutation rate but converging upon stability. Probably the infall of radionuclides, concentrated in certain areas by natural processes, would make caution advisable to the present time. But on the whole, this hypothetical planet could now be salubrious for your race or mine, if it otherwise resembles our homes sufficiently. I might add that it has been conjectured that accidents of this sort were responsible for periods of massive extinction on numerous worlds, including your own home sphere.”

  Trevelyan scarcely heard the flat words. All at once he was confronting horror.

  When the yellow sun was a disk, too lightful for bare eyes but softly winged with corona and zodiacal glow in a stepdown screen: then the supernova nebula, thirty parsecs off, was only an irregular blur, a few minutes across, among the constellations opposite, as if a bit of the Milky Way had drifted free. One had trouble imagining how it had raged in these skies four hundred years ago. Nor did interplanetary space any longer
have an unusual background count; nor did the seven attendant worlds that Genji's cameras identified seem in any way extraordinary.

  That was a false impression, Trevelyan knew. Every world is a wilderness of uncountably many uniquenesses. But the third one out, on which his attention focused, resembled Earth.

  He was confined to optical means of study. Beams and probes might be detected aboard Campesino. Murdoch had gone out of hyper into normal mode several millions of kilometers back. His shadowers necessarily followed suit. Then— lest he spot their neutrino emission, as they were now tracking him by his—they stopped the fusion generators and orbited free at their considerable distance, drawing power from the accumulators.

  ‘‘The study object is in the final phase of approach to atmosphere of the terrestroid planet,” Smokesmith announced.

  ‘‘I’m scarcely surprised,” Trevelyan answered. He looked up from his meters and notes. “Apparently it is as terrestroid as any you’ll ever find, too. Air, irradiation, size, mass as gotten from the satellites—nearly identical. Those are two small, fairly close-in moons, by the way; so the tide patterns must be complicated, but the oceans will be kept from stagnation. Twenty-eight-hour spin, twelve-degree tilt. Mean temperature a touch higher than Earth’s, no polar caps, somewhat less land area ... an interglacial macroclimate, I’d guess. In short, aside from pockets of left-over radioactivity, idyllic.”

  ‘‘And possible ecological difficulties,” the Reardonite said.

  Trevelyan winced. “Damn, did you have to remind me?” He left off peering, leaned back in his chair, held his chin and scowled. “Question is, what do we do about Murdoch? He doesn’t seem to have committed any violation except failure to register a discovery. And we probably couldn’t prove this isn’t his own first time here, that he didn’t come this way on impulse. Besides, the offense is trivial.”

  “Do methods not exist of compelling humans to speak truth?”

  “Yes. Electronic brainphasing. Quite harmless. But our species has rules against involuntary selfincrimination. So it’s mainly used to prove the honesty of prosecution witnesses. And as I said, I’ve no case against him.”

  “Need we do more than report back? Authorized expeditions could then be dispatched.”

  “ ‘Back’ is a mighty long ways. What might he do here meanwhile? Of course . . . hm-m-m ... if Murdoch doesn’t suspect we’re on to him, he may proceed leisurely with his preparations, giving us a chance to —”

  “The study object has ceased to emit.”

  “What?” Trevelyan surged from his chair. He abraded his arm on his companion’s integument, so fast did he brush by to look for himself. The indications were subtle, because the normal neutrino count is always high. But this tracer included a computer which identified engine sign amidst noise and put its volume on a single dial. That needle had fallen to zero.

  Chilled, Trevelyan said: “He’s going down on accumulators and aerodynamics. By the time we come in range for a different tracking method, he can be wherever on the surface.”

  Smokesmith’s tone was unchanging, but an acrid odor jetted from him and the petals of his face stirred. “Apparently he does not fear detection from the ground. We observe no trace of atomic energy, hence doubtless no one capable of locating it. The probability is that he desires to remove us and none else from his trail.”

  “Yeh.” Trevelyan began to pace, back and forth between the caging bulkheads. “We half expected he’d tag us somewhere along the line, when I’d already put him on the qui vive in Port Nevada. But why’s he telling us unequivocally that he has?”

  “In my race, messages are always intended as vectors on the world line of the percipient.”

  “In mine, too, sort of.” Trevelyan’s strides lengthened. “What does Murdoch hope to get us to do by thumbing his nose at us? We have two alternatives. We can go straight back, or we can land first for a closer look.”

  “The latter would not add significantly to the interval before we can have returned.”

  “That’s the black deuce of it, my friend. The very nearest Service base where we could originate any kind of investigatory expedition is Lir, I suppose, if they aren’t still too busy with the Storm Queen affair. There are frontier planets closer than that, full of men who’ll gladly swarm here for a chance of striking it rich. And if they can also do the Cordys one in the eye, why, fine.”

  “Furthermore,” Smokesmith pointed out, “we have no clear proof that anything is involved sufficiently important to justify a long-range mission. The supernova, yes. That is a scientific treasure. But here we have merely a seemingly uninhabited planet. Why should a base commander who does not know Murdoch’s past—especially a nonhuman base commander who cannot ingest its significance— assume he has an unlawful purpose? Will he not expect Murdoch to request an inspection team, that a patent of discovery may be issued?’’

  Trevelyan nodded. We arc scattered so thinly, we who guard the great Pact. Often we must pass by tracks that may well lead toward a hidden evil, because we know about another beast elsewhere. Or we learn of something that was wrong at the beginning and should have been stopped, but whose amendment now would be a worse wrong. We have Nerthus, for example, always before us: a human colony founded and flourishing, then learning that native intelligent life did exist. We are fortunate that in that case the interests of the two species are reconcilable, with endless difficulty.

  “Does Murdoch wish us to return in alarm bearing data inadequate to provoke prompt official action?’’ Smokesmith queried. “That seems plausible. Coming as he lately did from the Union’s Scorpian march, he must be better informed than we about current situations there.

  Thus, he might know we can get no help at Lir.”

  “We can . . . we can even commandeer civilian ships and personnel—if yonder planet has sentient beings on it. Clear and present danger of territorial conquest. Or Murdoch might simply be plundering them.”

  “It is improbable that such are alive.”

  “True. If dead—”

  Trevelyan stopped. He looked long outward. Unmagnified, the world was a point of light, a clear and lovely blue. But close in would be mapless immensity. The other crew would have had ample chance to conceal their vessel. They could be anywhere, preparing anything. They surely outnumbered and outgunned him. He hated to imagine big, bluff Murdoch Juan as planning murder. On the other hand, Faustina might, and she had had this entire voyage in which to be the only human female . . .

  Resolution crystallized. “We’re going in,” he said.

  They approached slowly, both to observe in detail and to make certain preparations. Circling in the fringes of atmosphere, they confirmed the thing they had guessed at.

  This had been a peopled world. The people had been slain.

  Were there survivors, there would be evidence of them. Civilization might well have gone under in mass death, panic, anarchy, and famine after crops perished in fields now brushland or desert. But savage descendants of a city-building race would live in villages. Genii's sensors would register their very campfires. Besides, it was more reasonable that some comeback would have been made, however weak. For the sleet of cosmic radiation harmed no buildings, no tools or machines, no books—little, indeed, except what was alive.

  Gazing into a viewscreen, where clouds parted briefly to show high towers by a lake, Trevelyan said: “Populous, which means they had efficient agriculture and transportation, at least in their most advanced regions. I can identify railway lines and the traces of roads. Early industrial, I’d guess, combustion engines, possible limited use of electricity . . . But they had more aesthetic sense, or something, than most cultures at that technological level. They kept beauty around them.” He hauled his thoughts away from what that implied. If he did not stay impersonal, he must weep.

  “Did they succumb to radiation effects alone?” Smokesmith wondered. He appeared to have no trouble maintaining detachment. But then, he did not feel humanlike emotions, as Trevel
yan judged the dead beings had. “Shelter was available.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know about radioactivity. Or maybe the escapers were too few, too scattered, too badly mutated. Anyhow, they’re gone—Hold!”

  Trevelyan’s hands danced over the board. Genji swung about, backtracked, and came to hover.

  Atmosphere blurred the magnified view, but beams, detectors, and computer analysis helped. A town stood on an island in a wide river. Thus, despite the bridges that soared from bank to bank, it was not thickly begrown by vegetation. What had entered was largely cleared away: recent work, the rawness identifiable. The job had been done by machines, a couple of which stood openly in a central plaza. Trevelyan couldn’t spot details, but never doubted they were Earth-made robotic types. Several buildings had been blasted, either as too ruinous or as being in the way, and the rubble shoved aside. He got no indications of current activity, but strong electronic resonance suggested that a modern power network was partly completed.

  “Murdoch,” Trevelyan said like a curse.

  “Can you obtain indications of his ship?” the Reardonite asked.

  “No. When he detected us approaching, he must have moved her, and screened as well as camouflaged the hull. Maybe he hoped we wouldn’t chance to notice what he’s been up to, or maybe this is another gibe. Certainly he must’ve gotten busy here the instant he landed, after choosing the site on his first visit.”

  Trevelyan put the speedster back into orbit. For a while the conn held only a humming silence. The planet filled half the sky with clouds, seas, sunrises and sunsets; the other half was stars.

  “No autochthons left,” Smoke- smith mused at last. “Their relics are of limited scientific interest. Will this be adjudged grounds for sending armed craft, that are badly needed elsewhere, to make him stop?’

  “Supposing it is—that’s uncertain, as you say, but supposing it is—can they stop him?” Trevelyan seized the controls again. The power hum deepened. “Prepare for descent.”