The truth of the matter was he wanted to go down onto the surface of the world they had just seen as badly as Coop or anyone.
Chapter 10
But the other fourteen worlds taken by the Golden People from the Gray-furs, as they were visited one by one, showed the same ancient scars of destruction and air of desertion. The worlds themselves were spread out, never more than two among the planets of any solar system, through some eighty-odd years of space. Observation, taking surveys as the ship went, had already established with over ninety percent of certainty that they were the only planets with a possibility of being habitable by humans (and therefore by Gray-furs and Golden People) within a fairly large area of space. For one thing, even in this relatively overcrowded area of the galaxy where the stellar population was a number of times that in the skies around Earth, there were no Go stars the size of Earth’s Sun for nearly a hundred light-years in any direction.
Ben was beginning to think—and Observation tended to agree with him—that humanly habitable planets were rarer even than estimates back on Earth had figured them to be. Although it could be that the phase ship had simply found itself in areas where Sol-like Suns were scarcer than normal.
All the same, thought Ben at his desk in the office, as the phase ship was completing the last jump of the shift he had ordered back to approach position on the first Golden Peoples’ world they had investigated, there was something almost eerie about the situation. If another conquering race had passed by here, defeating the Golden People as the Golden People had defeated the Gray-furs, the conquerors had not stopped to reap any profit from their victories. They had simply killed and passed on.
That was against reason for any technologically civilized, intelligent mind of which Ben’s human mind could conceive. Of course, among the trillions of stars making up the galaxy it was possible to imagine that there could be civilized and intelligent space-going races that would operate in ways making no sense at all to a human mind. But still . . .but still. Ben could not bring himself to believe that a reasonless extermination was what had happened to the Golden People.
A knock on the door of his office brought Ben out of his speculations.
“Ready to shift,” said Walt, opening the door from the Control Section.
“Coming,” said Ben, briefly. He got up from his desk and followed Walt into the Control Section.
“This time,” Ben said, “we’ll shift into orbit position, take pictures, and shift out again after sixty seconds, as before.” He closed the office door behind him. “After we compare this set of pictures with the last, we’ll think about going down to surface. Not before.”
“Yes, sir,” said Walt, calmly.
“Prepare to shift.”
“Prepare to shift—” Walt was beginning when there was an interruption. A sound of shouting, jeering voices from the front part of the ship, echoing through the metal walls and doors of the Observation Section and making itself heard up through the Sections even to the Control Section at the end.
“Report!” Tessie Sorenson was beginning, speaking into the phone before her, but Ben put a hand on her shoulder.
“Hold that!” he ordered. He walked forward through
the Sections and pushed open the door from Observation to step into the corridor facing the Lounge entrance.
Ridiculously and without reason, a small riot seemed to be in process there. The corridor and the Lounge before it were filled with arguing off-duty crew members, at the center of which was Polly, pale and upset, holding the cat, Sprocket, in her arms. Beside Polly, was Coop, his face white and furious, standing almost nose to nose with Kirk Walish. Seeing them bristling at each other like this, Ben was suddenly reminded of how small Kirk actually was—no more than average height, if that much, and thin to boot. It was his challenging attitude and sharp tongue that gave him always the impression of being so much bigger than he really was. Young Coop, facing him now, overtopped him by a full head and must have outweighed him by thirty or forty pounds, but of the two it was Kirk who looked more in command of the dispute.
“But I tell you, he did!” Polly was insisting. She looked on the verge of tears. “He purred!”
“Just happened to,” sneered Kirk. “Of course! Just before we shift in above the planet everyone knows is okay. And just when there happened to be no one else around to hear. Too bad!”
“Listen—” said Coop thickly to him, “you’re calling her a liar, are you?”
“Why, I’m not calling her a liar.” Kirk grinned up at him. “I’m just pointing out a few facts. Facts—”
“Shut up!” roared Ben, reaching the three of them at last. He found himself seething with rage. “Shut your mouth, Kirk! You too, Coop. All of you—shut up!”
The voices around him fell still abruptly. The silence, during which he glared around at all of them, even at Polly who stood awkwardly on her one artificial lower leg, holding the irritated and hissing cat protectively to her.
“What is this—some sort of Sunday picnic?” Ben’s genuine fury put a ring in his voice that he saw having its effect upon the faces within his field of vision. “We’ve got a world to land on in two hours time—and we don’t know it’s okay! All we know is that we can’t find anything to guard against down there. Two hours from now we may all be dead! And you’ve got nothing better to do right now but get into a fight over whether a cat purred or not!”
He glared around at all of them again, but apparently there was no one hardy enough to argue with him.
“That’s all I want to hear of this kind of noise!” Turning on his heel, he went back into the Sections. He did not hear the sound of the argument starting up again.
They shifted in close to the world, took their pictures, and retreated sixty seconds later. A careful study of the pictures this time with the techniques evolved for the analysis of aerial photos showed no meaningful difference from the pictures they had taken on their earlier visit.
Standing over the matched photos on Observation’s large screen, Ben hesitated. There seemed to be no good reason why the phase ship should not shift back into the orbit position they had just left, and from there down to the surface of the Golden People’s world.
“All right, we’ll go down,” he said, turning to Walt. “But I want to shift no closer than a hundred feet from the ground and hold while we look over our landing area before touching down.”
“Yes sir,” said Walt, as calmly as ever. But it seemed to Ben that Walt’s eyes paused a moment, considering Ben, before the big man turned away to give the necessary orders. For the first time, wildly and irrationally, the suspicion awoke in Ben that his momentary hesitation over going down had caused Walt to doubt him—even to think him a coward. It was the first, time it had ever occurred to Ben to think that Walt might doubt his will to succeed and his right to command aboard the phase ship.
That could be a more serious matter than settling an argument over whether a cat had purred or not Walt was over-sized, both physically and mentally, and, a man of unswerving independence. He could not be fooled and he could not be bullied. —Ben put the matter out of his mind and followed Walt back to the Control Section.
They shifted down within a hundred feet of the ground over a small open area of raw earth and scrubby vegetation—it might have been a park once—among the buildings of the city. It was early morning, and the tall slender buildings around them looked like fanciful stage settings for an imaginative play. Nothing stirred in the hot, bright sunlight below and around them. Again, the heat radar showed nothing. Air samples and all other tests showed favorable.
“Shift to surface!” said Ben.
There was a tiny touch of shift-nausea, and the screen over Tessie Sorenson’s head, before Ben, now showed a view from ground level, a view of the bases of the slender buildings only forty or fifty feet away beyond the bulge of the outer airlock door, hiding the lower left corner of the screen. Ben felt the phase ship settling almost imperceptibly under him as local gra
vity replaced the internal and artificial force of shift oscillation.
“All right,” he said, speaking stiffly with the tension of the moment “Captain Bone, come with me to the airlock.”
They went through the office to pick up two of the Weyerlander half-guns, then down the short corridor to the airlock. It was all but filled. Most of the off-duty people were there, eagerly waiting to pour out through the airlock’s double doors as soon as they were opened.
“Stand back,” said Ben, grimly. “We’ll take a look outside first.”
He pressed the button that swung open the inner door of the airlock and stepped through it. He pressed the second button and heard the heavy interior door swing closed behind him. The outer door began slowly to swing wide. He looked out at sunlit-brown earth and weeds, with the curved sides of buildings a short distance off—empty and peaceful. He turned back and pressed the button that would open the inner lock without closing the outer one.
As he watched the inner door swung open. He saw the faces of the crew looking past him—then suddenly they contorted, changing. Somebody shouted. Ben swung around to look out upon the open space beyond the outer door of the airlock—and coming toward the ship with giant strides, he saw half a dozen tall, thin, golden figures with slim, short rods like javelins in their hands.
Ben’s hands shot out and jabbed the “close” button on the outer airlock door. The door stirred and began to swing toward him, to close again.
lightning against, the closing door. There was a crash and the whole phase ship rocked. Ben staggered, trying to keep his feet and desperately blinking the lightning dazzle out of his eyes. As he began to be able to see again, he perceived the outer airlock door, sagging half-torn off its massive hinges and distorted by a smoking cleft in its upper edge.
Then, the circle of sunlight where the door had been was being blotted out by thin giant shapes, scrambling into the airlock. Ben and those around him were being herded outside into the sunlight beyond the airlock, while others of the tall golden figures plunged on into the further depths of the phase ship.
Ben and the others in the airlock went numbly and allowed themselves to be rounded up outside and kept standing under the impersonal, oval, olive gaze of two of the attackers. Ben held the half-gun still in his hand as did Walt, but their guards made no attempt to take the weapons from them. It was very possible that the guards did not recognize the half-guns as weapons. In any case, he felt no impulse to try and use the one in his hands. Compared to the casual bolt from the slender four-foot rod that had tom the heavy outer airlock door half off the ship, a half-gun could be no more than a toy—a toy pitiful in its limitations.
The hot sun warmed the top of Ben’s head. Through the open airlock he could hear sounds of things broken or tom loose inside the ship. He expected at any minute to see those crew members who were still inside the ship be herded out by the lightning-bearing javelins of the Golden People who had entered. But they did not come.
After a little while, however, the Golden People who had gone into the phase ship began to come out. They were carrying all manner of things—chairs from the Lounge and tools from the machine shop on the lower deck—Ben even saw one carrying a copy of Nora’s Stores inventory report that had been on his desk. One of them, who was particularly overloaded, stopped to share his burdens with one of the two guarding the knot of humans outside the ship—and the two large golden figures went off together.
The humans outside the ship were themselves beginning to become restless and dart unhappy glances at the open airlock beyond which the fate of those still inside the ship was hidden and unknown.
“Stand still,” muttered Ben, without moving his lips, as another one of the. Golden People came out of the airlock, carrying Ben’s desk armchair with one long, javelin-bearing arm wrapped around it. “Don’t talk.”
Those about him fell silent. But his voice, pitched low, did not carry its warning to those farthest from the airlock. Just at that moment, the voice of Burt Sullivan, out there at Ben’s left, came clearly to Ben’s ear.
“Why doesn’t somebody try to slip in through the airlock when these watchdogs aren’t looking at him?” Burt was saying. “Then he could—”
The Golden alien carrying the armchair halted almost in front of Burt, turned slightly still holding the armchair so as to face the humans, and without loosening his grip pointed his javelin at the group. From its tip lashed out a wire-thin, smaller, paler version of the bolt of silver lightning that had halted and tom loose the airlock door. Ben could see Burt go down out of sight behind the intervening bodies as the bolt struck. And then the silver lash leaped again, and whoever was standing next to Burt went down as well.
The Golden alien turned and went on without pausing.In eight or nine long strides, while die humans stood stunned, his great legs carried him to and around one of the surrounding buildings, out of sight. As he disappeared, the human group came out of its moment of frozen shock, and with a little moan, sagged back from the two fallen figures.
Ben could see them now. One was faceless, almost headless, and unrecognizable. But that one must be Burt because the body slashed and burnt across the chest lying next to it bore the face of John Edlung, who had been so sure that he would die before he could get back to Earth.
Their single remaining guard had taken a step toward them, now, his javelin half-lifted at the sound of their moan, and their movement.
“Stand still!” snapped Ben, low-voiced between his teeth. But Kirk, fists clenched and shoulders quivering, was already stepping forward out of the group toward the guard.
“You want to kill somebody?” Kirk’s voice went up on a rising note. “You want to kill somebody—” He was advancing toward the guard hands now open and up as he talked, with every evident intention of leaping for the narrow golden throat, nearly four feet above his own head. The guard lifted his javelin as if to shoot, apparently changed his mind, and struck out and down with it as if it had been a slender club.
The sheer size of the guard made the movement awkward. Kirk dodged under the blow and for a moment it looked as if he would reach the guard’s throat after all. But then the javelin swept down at an angle again; and Kirk, trying to dodge, backed up against the hull of the phase ship with no room to slip aside.
The rod caught him across the side and the back, about waist high, as he was trying to duck away, and slammed him up against the hull. He fell to the ground, made an effort to scramble to his feet, and was defeated by the fact that his legs were no longer responding. He shouted something furiously up at the guard, as the tall, golden body moved between him and the other humans, blocking off their view as it struck down again.
The hidden blow cut off abruptly the sound of Kirk’s voice. But the guard, half-squatting from his nine feet or so of height above where Kirk lay, continued to strike, the way someone with a horror of vermin continues to beat an already motionless rat or snake to make sure it is dead. The body of watching humans swayed forward all together with an instinctive movement.
“Still! Stand still!” cried Ben, raggedly. He threw up an arm in time to get his forearm across the throat of Coop, beside him, who was going forward yet, unhearingly. Coop checked, choking, and a moment later Ben saw him encircled and held by the massive arms of Walt. The movement stopped.
The back of the guard was still to them.
“Stay here, all of you!” muttered Ben harshly. “And don’t twitch a finger!” He turned and slipped off to the right, up the foot high step into the airlock. Within, all was quiet. He ran as silently as possible on the tips of his toes down the short corridor and into the corridor on the women’s side of the ship. The back of a tall, golden figure was to him, evidently dragging something heavy out of one of the staterooms.
Ben backed up a step, opened the door to the Special Stores Room, slipped inside, and closed the door. He stood with the silent and apparently untouched cartons around him and the automatic light on overhead, his ear pressed to t
he cold metal panel, listening. After a little he heard something heavy and apparently metallic being dragged,squeaking and screeching down the corridor to the entrance to the short airlock corridor, then off down the airlock corridor and into silence. He opened the door a crack and peered out to find no one in sight. He slipped out into the corridor himself, again.
Opposite him was the door to his office. He laid his ear against the upper panel, heard nothing, and opened the door a crack. The room within was empty. He slipped inside, closing the door behind him.
Now, for the first time, pausing in the familiar surroundings of his office, he felt the helpless fear, which had been pushed into one comer of his mind by the emergency up until now, threaten to rise and overtake him. He felt it coming up like sour acid in his throat and dissolving all the drive and purpose wakened in him by the sight of the guard clubbing Kirk. —He must not continue to stand here, he told himself, with a silent gasp of panic. If he did, all the courage in him would leak away and he would think of nothing but finding some cupboard or shielded hole of the ship to crawl into and wait, either for the going of the Golden People or the moment when they would find him there.
He broke the paralysis holding him with a wild effort and stepped to the door leading to the Control Section. He jerked it open without even putting his ear to it first, and stepped through.
In her seat before the Control instruments, Tessie Sorenson looked up at him with a face as pale as the paper of the Presidential message that he had altered to bring them all here. He looked down through the openings between the various Sections to the closed door at the far end of the Observation Section. He saw the on-duty members of the crew seated at their instruments, but no towering golden figures.
“Were they in here?” he demanded, in a hoarse, low voice, of Tessie. She nodded. “You all sat tight?” She nodded again. “What happened?”
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