“Take me,” said Julian at Ben’s elbow. “I’ve had commando training.” Ben turned to stare at the slight, dark man.
“All right,” said Ben, swallowing his surprise. “Walt, I want you to signal the minutes from the time we leave the ship in flashes, on the minute, through the Observation window. After we’ve been gone one minute, show a single flash, after two minutes, two flashes, and so forth . . . With our watches, it will serve as an extra time check. It’s a good thing the watch cases are plastic.”
“I’ll do that,” said Walt.
“Let’s get busy then,” said Ben. “I want to be out in the open at the base of that cliff in four hours.” He checked himself. “Plastic watches and flashlights are okay even if the Gray-furs have metal detectors up on that cliff, but we can’t use guns or knives.” He turned to Julian who had paused on his way out the door. “What’s your suggestion, Julian? I was thinking of something like sandbags for blackjacks?”
“Very good,” said Julian politely. “And short lengths of plastic cord with handles for strangling ropes. You can break a neck with a length of tough plastic cord quite easily if it’s properly handled.”
“Yes,” said Ben, striving to hide the internal shudder,that went through him. He did not enjoy the prospect of breaking any neck, even one belonging to a Gray-fur. “Get busy then,” he said, trying to match Julian’s calmness of voice.
The meeting split up and the work began swiftly. Outside the phase ship, the sun was already down and the dry valley was a river of darkness with the streak of star-studded, moonless sky overhead. It was a little less than four hours later that Ben and the four others emerged from the mouth of the tunnel up into the darkness at the base of the right-hand cliff.
A tap of Ben’s forefinger on Julian’s shoulder and alight shove started Julian off along the cliff away from the encircled ship, until it should be judged safe for him and the two with him to cross over to the cliff on the other side. Ben turned to Coop, the only one to attack the right-hand cliff with him. In the darkness he could not see Coop—both of them were darkness themselves, wearing coveralls hastily dyed black and taped tight at wrist and ankle—the tape and all exposed skin darkened with carbon black. He tapped Coop silently on the shoulder and urged him to the cliff beside them. Together, they began their climb.
It was not a difficult face to climb, even for amateurs. But the darkness made it tricky, and Ben—in spite of the regular physical exercises he demanded of himself as well as of the rest of the crew—found his muscles out of condition for it, his wind short. The eight-inch length of sand-bag-style blackjack, penduluming at his belt, was a nuisance. So was the cord, which managed to catch itself on bosses and projections of rock as they climbed.
They crawled out at last, panting, onto the level top of the cliff, and Ben looked down at the Observation window of the ship. He saw darkness—and then twelve spaces flashes. Twelve minutes since they had emerged into the darkness at the base of the cliff. They could lie here a second and catch their breath. Their efforts must be times with Julian's, on the opposite cliff top; and Julian had considerable more distance to cover—although, where would be climbing the opposite cliff with his two partners, the rise was only about two thirds what Ben and Coop had just come up.
The night was dry and cold—bathed in sweat inside his black coveralls, the coolness bothered Ben not at all. He lay watching the glowing numerals of his watch face. When twenty minutes had elapsed since they had left the tunnel mouth, he tapped Coop on the shoulder. They roused and crept up along the cliff top toward the nearest Gray-fur weapon.
There were only two upright, man-like shapes black against the sky there, as the two humans approached the weapon. Ben and Coop, like Julian, Kirk, and Ralph, would be coming up safely from downwind—Ben remembered how the triple nostrils of the Gray-furs had closed protectively when he and Walt walked up to the yellow line earlier in the day. Provided they were quiet, the Gray-furs on the weapons should have no warning.
Ben, with Coop lost in darkness at his right, was almost upon the weaponeers now. Ben reached out and touched Coop’s invisible shoulder, giving it a light push. He felt the shoulder go away from him and began to count seconds slowly under his breath. Thirty seconds, it had been agreed, would give Coop time to circle behind the other Gray-fur.
The one in front of Ben was only a few feet away, standing behind the eight-foot high black mass of the weapon. The weaponeer moved a little, restlessly, looking out across, the valley with his back to Ben. The secondhand Ben glanced at was rapidly approaching the thirty second deadline. He took the heavy shape of the “sand-bag” from his belt and weighed it in his hand. A suddenly horrible pity for the intelligent creature he was about to strike down gushed suddenly up in him. The second hand touched deadline. He rose behind the five foot black shape and struck out and down with all the fury of revulsion against what he was doing, and desperation.
The figure dropped before him. He found himself leaning over it, panting in the starlight. He jerked his head about and saw what was obviously the human figure of Coop like a black cutout against the pinpoint-blazing sky. They stood alone.
But there was no time to be wasted if they were to stay on schedule with Julian and the others on the opposite cliff top. They went on, and some forty yards back past the point where they had climbed the cliff they approached the second weapon on this side.
As with the earlier weapons, the two weaponeers here fell without a protest or a struggle under the blows of the sandbags. Thank God, thought Ben, he had not been called upon to use the strangling cord. Now that the need was past, he found himself wondering if he would have had the courage to use it—he forced that question from his mind. He looked again at the dark Observation window and waited—then counted twenty-nine flashes. A minute yet before Julian should have completed his work on the opposite cliff.
A low whistle came from across the canyon of darkness that was the valley, seen from the cliff tops. Ben whistled back. —A moment later a light gleamed on the other cliff top and blinked twice before being extinguished. Julian had been successful.
Ben reached into a pocket of his coveralls for the plastic flashlight there. He took it out and shone its light cautiously on the weapon. This was the moment he had not been able to prepare for in his plans aboard ship. It was one thing to put the Gray-fur weaponeers out of action—quite another thing to put the weapons themselves out of action. For all he knew they had been set to fire automatically at any attempt of the phase ship to take off. Now, his small flashlight revealed an incomprehensible piece of metal equipment consisting of a large box-shape about eight feet on a side, connected to a smaller, rectangular shape with a sloping face from which protruded inch-thick studs, or rods, of lengths varying from a fraction of an inch to several inches. The only thing resembling at all the business end of a gun as humans knew it was a stubby, yard-high antenna-like projection with a loop at the top, facing in the direction of the phase ship below.
Ben flashed his light toward the underside of the weapon. Yes, it was mounted on the same sort of barely-floating sled on which he had traveled to the Gray-furs’ city. This sled of course was much larger, but—experimentally he leaned his weight against the weapon and pushed. It moved, yielding position reluctantly, but definitely, for several inches.
“Help me, here!” said Ben in a low, but urgent tone to Coop.
Together, they put their shoulders to the weapon and urged it toward the cliff edge. It did not resist their efforts so much as it gave to them, slowly. Slowly, like pushing a truck through hub-deep water, they approached the cliff edge—and suddenly the mass vanished before them, and they fell on their faces.
Fantastically, there was no crash from below. Ben crept to the very edge of the cliff face and peered down, vainly trying to see the weapon on the valley floor. Evidently the sled on which it was mounted had somehow preserved it on the way down. —But the important thing was that the weapon could no longer be aimed to do the
phase ship any damage.
“Push them off the cliff—the weapons!” shouted Ben across to Julian, between cupped hands, throwing discretion to the winds. He turned to Coop. “Come on!”
He led the way back down to the other weapon on their side. The dark masses of the fallen Gray-furs still lay beside its mass. Had they killed the weaponeers with those sandbag blows? In any case, there was no time now to find out. He and Coop together leaned and pushed against the other weapon. It slid slowly, tipped—and fell.
Then they were scrambling down the cliff and running for the aitlock of the ship, which now stood open for them. Julian's team met them at it.
“Both weapons down on our side, sir,” gasped Julian.
Ben nodded, too winded to answer, and led the way into the airlock. Walt was waiting for them there.
“Ready to lift as soon as the airlock’s closed,” Walt said.
“Let’s go!” said Ben. He charged down the corridor toward the Control Section with Walt at his heels. In a moment they had passed through the office and were standing above Tessie Sorenson at the Control instruments.
“Prepare to shift.”
“Report.”
“Match!”
“Match!”
“Match!”
“Sir, ready to shift”
“Shift then!” said Ben, too out of breath to worry about any of a thousand possible chances, including the fact that the Gray-furs might have had more than one means of destroying them at any attempt to lift ship.
They shifted. And suddenly they were among the stars.
“Captain Bone,” croaked Ben, breathlessly, “shift again as soon as possible on your own authority to a distance of at least a light-year. I think I’ll take this chance to catch a little rest.”
“Yes sir,” said Walt
Ben turned and went through the connecting door to his office, and from his office into his bedroom. Wearily, he stripped off his coveralls, socks, and shoes and crawled under the covers too tired even to wash the lamp black from his face and hands.
Sleep descended on him like a stooping hawk. —But there was yet time before it claimed him, for him to remember how he had jerked and reacted under the beams of the Gray-furs, and that the whole ship had witnessed these actions. Convulsed with humiliation, he buried his face in the darkness of the pillow.
Chapter 9
“Make star charts from our film of the Gray-fur images?” echoed Coop. “Why, yes sir, I guess so. You mean the part where they showed you how the Golden People drove them off their home worlds?”
“Yes,” said Ben. The phase ship was safely lost in space again, a full light-year from the Gray-furs’ planet, and he had called a conference of the senior officers—Coop, Walt and Nora, as well as a pale and scarecrow-thin Lee Ruiz, for the first time in months. Suddenly, as if the blocked off natural healing processes of his body had broken through whatever had been holding them back, Lee had mended. Now, all that was visible of the open slash around his throat was a red line like a welt.
Whether Lee’s presence at this conference would help or hurt, Ben could not tell at the moment. But Lee could not very well be excluded. And, Ben reminded himself, he had even considered calling a full meeting of the ship’s company instead of this conference to announce his present decision and the reasons for it. But such a meeting would have been an open invitation to debate about the decision, silent or otherwise, a debate in which he would be on one side and the rest of those aboard on the other.
No, he thought again, now. This way was better. A decision coming out of conference, even though it was his decision, implied the agreement of the senior officers with it. But it would call for careful handling to present not only the decision but his reasons for it as if they arose spontaneously out of the conversation of everyone there. In Ben’s mind he juggled, like different weights against each other, the agreeableness of Lee, the stolidity of Walt, the protectiveness of Nora, and the impulsiveness of Coop. Coop would have to be his pigeon, this time.
Ben roused from his thoughts to see all four of them looking at him curiously.
“Have the charts made as soon as possible, then,” Ben said. “We’ll be going to take a look at those worlds.”
It took a moment for his words to sink into them. Ben saw a variety of expressions, from Nora’s of shock to Lee’s of dismay.
“Going there?” said Lee. “But I thought we’d be heading home, now?”
It was a dangerous question, expressed aboard a ship where there could hardly be anyone who did not long to head homeward. Ben, even with a court-martial and retribution waiting for him, felt that longing himself. There could be no temporizing with such a question.
“We haven’t yet found a habitable world, Captain,” said Ben formally.
“But the world we were just on—the Gray-furs—”
“Happens to be populated,” said Ben, dryly. “We’re not out to find worlds to conquer. We’re out to find worlds to settle.”
“But—” it was Coop finally, unable to resist the impulse to get into the discussion. Ben turned to him almost in relief. “If we had to run away from the Gray-furs and the Gray-furs had to run away from the Golden People, what good will it do us to go look at planets the Golden People’ve taken over?”
“Our job,” said Ben, “is to investigate all potentially habitable planets. If the Gray-furs lived on them, those planets are potentially habitable.”
“But isn’t it our duty not to risk—” Nora began and broke off. “I mean, if a race of conquerors like the Golden People find out about Earth, they might want our world, too.” She hesitated, plainly on the verge of saying something more, then changed her mind. It was not necessary for her to say anything more. They all, including Ben, knew what she was talking about. It was the same ancient fear Marsh Otam had expressed back on Earth the day they had first lifted ship, the fear that was in all of them including Ben himself, deep and unkillable. The fear of the night beyond the fire light, of the dark depths of the unknown forest, of the western edge of the flat world where the seas went pouring off into space.
“They won’t find out,” said Ben. “We can make sure they don’t. There’s no one aboard this ship that knows the way home.” He looked around at them, at their startled faces. “Have you forgotten?” he said. “The only way we can find our way back to Earth is by using the data stored in the tape decks of the memory tank in Computation.”
They had none of them thought of it, Ben saw. Or rather, they had known it so well that they had ceased to think about it It was the stored data of past computations, and the distance and direction of their shifts, that alone would permit the ship now to figure its way to one small Go star lost among billions of other stellar bodies. Destroy those tape decks and the phase ship would never get home. Even one long shift from the Sun—even at a thousand light-years distance—they would be condemned to wander forever without the tape decks and their store of data.
“We’re going to pull those tape decks,” said Ben. “I’ve got fresh ones in my safe here to replace them with.” He glanced over at Lee. “That’s why I asked Captain Ruiz to sit in on this conference, although he’s just barely up and around again. The original decks will be kept in the safe here with a device that’ll destroy them instantly on a signal from me, or if any attempt is made to force the safe. If this ship should be surprised or taken by aliens and in my judgment there was no hope for us, I’ll destroy the tapes immediately.”
There was a fresh silence at that. Like a man who has just been informed by his doctor of a dangerous weakness in one of his vital organs, the other four were feeling newly aware of their dependence upon the tape deck.
“I want that film studied,” Ben went on, “and star charts made from it showing the way to each of the worlds pictured. We’ll come as close as we think safe, shift quickly into camera range of each world, take sixty seconds worth of film, and shift out again automatically. Then, safely off in space, we can examine the pictures
before going in closer.”
“But still, what’s the use of it all?” persisted Coop, daring to argue more than he had ever done before. “The Gray-furs are stronger than we are—”
“No,” said Ben. He had encouraged Coop the last few weeks to come up with this very type of protest in conference. So that he would have somebody to bring out the questions he wished to answer for all those present. It was the role Lee had originally filled, of interlocutor. “The Gray-furs are at a disadvantage with us. Why do you think we were able to dispose of those weapon crews and get away as easily as we did?”
“Why, you took them by surprise—” began Nora.
“But why were we able to take them by surprise?” interrupted Ben, turning to her. “It had to be because there was no sense of originality in what they were doing to guard us. Observation can probably slow the film down and get an idea of the time span involved, but the Gray-furs have been on that world, according to the images they showed me, for at least a hundred thousand years. It’s a hundred thousand years since they ran away from attack. A hundred thousand years since they’ve been in a combat situation. Our landing triggered off an automatic ancient pattern of defense, but that was all. Do you all understand that?”
He looked around at them.
“N-no,” said Coop, hesitantly, but honestly.
“The pattern,” explained Ben, “was to immobilize any unknown space ship making a landing, to take a sample individual from those aboard it, and find out if he had the same conqueror-type characteristics as the Golden People had displayed. The Gray-furs wouldn’t want to destroy such an unknown ship until, first, they knew it was safe to do so, and, second, they were sure they’d found out all there was to be known about the race it came from.” There was a murmur from the others. Ben saw he had brought them that far in understanding, at least.
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