He had tried to keep an idea of direction in his mind as he had been following the alien he had shot. Now, as well as he could judge, the sound of shooting seemed to be coming from back where the phase ship was. He went in that direction as fast as he was able.
It did not seem such a long way back, but he was forced to stop twice to rest. After that first burst of firing, there had been no sound; find as he broke at last into the little clearing where the ship lay, it was empty.
At that moment there was new burst of firing and a distant sound of shouting not far off among the buildings to Ben’s right. He spun about and headed in that direction. The firing was stilled, but the sounds of human voices, rising to shouts at times, were like a beacon guiding him. He came around the curve of a gray tower, finally, and came upon Ralph Egan, half-gun in hand, stooping over the body of one of the Golden aliens.
Ben pounded up to halt before him. Ralph had just picked up the dead alien’s javelin. He stared at Ben. Ben opened his mouth to speak, found he was too out of breath for words, and instead snatched the javelin out of Ralph’s grasp. Tucking the other javelin and the rifle under his arm, he examined the weapon he had just taken from Ralph. It looked identical with the one he himself had been carrying, but it was more a metal weight and feel, and the ring on this one moved.
“Where are they?” he snapped at Ralph, as his wind returned.
Ralph pointed ahead between the buildings.
Ben ran on, hearing Ralph behind him. He burst out from between two of the buildings and found himself in a little, bowl-shaped open area, midway between a dozen men from the ship at his left and five aliens at his right. One of the aliens was down. The other four had apparently just emerged from the buildings on their side of the open area. They stopped now and looked at the downed alien and the humans, only seventy or eighty feet away. One of them whipped up his javelin and a thin silver line arced toward the humans, but fell short by a dozen feet.
“Don’t shoot!” shouted Ben, beginning to run toward the men. But Walt, in the lead of them, was already firing ,and a second later the rest followed his example. The tall golden bodies tumbled.
“Damn you!” gasped Ben, running up between them and the aliens. “Don’t shoot, I said!”
They stared at him. Across a couple of yards of distance, Walt’s eyes stared straight into his.
“Look out!” shouted somebody behind Walt “One’s still coming!”
Ben turned to see one of the fallen aliens, trailing a broken leg, crawling forward at them with his javelin still clutched in one hand. A shot rang out and the alien dropped flat, unmoving.
Ben spun back to face them.
“Put your guns down!” he snarled. “That’s an order!”
He glared at them. Several of those standing back slowly and reluctantly lowered their half-guns to the earth. Walt and Coop as well as some others behind Walt did not.
“That one was still coming at us,” muttered Coop, rebelliously.
“Of course he was still coming!” snapped Ben. “That’s instinct in them, to attack anything that looks like an enemy. But that’s all it is—instinct. They’ve regressed. They’re like animals—can’t you see that? Most of those weapons of theirs are just carved imitations of the real thing. Just sticks. Look!”
He threw at Coop both the javelin he had cut into and the one he had taken from Ralph Egan. They bounced off Coop’s chest and fell to the ground. Coop bent down to pick them up and compare them curiously. He and the others let their guns drop. Walt had not moved.
“Animals.”
“We’ll decide about that later,” said Ben.
He became suddenly aware that Walt still held his half-gun in such a way that the muzzle was pointing forward, hip high, aimed in Ben’s general direction. And the hunting rifle in his own hands hung half-ready and nearly aimed at Walt. Across the two yards of distance between them they stared at each other. There was no expression at all on Walt’s face.
Ben waited. The group around Coop behind Walt were all occupied now in examining the two javelins Ben had thrown at Coop. They did not see what was going on between Walt and Ben, but in a second someone among them would notice, and then there would be no backing down quietly for either Walt or himself. Walt’s gun could go off now, apparently by accident, and while some of those behind the big man might suspect, the damage would be done—
Walt lowered his gun while Ben was still in mid-thought; and Ben with an inward sigh of relief let his rifle sag also in his grasp, so that its muzzle pointed earthwards.
“Let’s get everybody back to the ship,” said. Ben. “There’s an alien body back aways I want carried to the ship for dissection, and I think we better discuss the situation here in conference in my office. Things are a good deal different than we suspected.”
“Yes sir,” said Walt.
They returned to the ship. None of the Golden People attacked them on the way back, and the body of the alien they brought back with them for dissection was sealed in a canvas freeze-sack outside the ship until Ben could get to work at it. For there was something to be done first, a sad job that took precedence over everything else.
This was the burial of Burt Sullivan, Kirk Walish, and John Edlung, the first of the dead of the phase ship to be put down under alien soil with ordinary rites. Burt Sullivan had been listed in Ben’s files as a Catholic, Kirk was down as Lutheran, and John Edlung had nothing at all in the blank where religion was supposed to be entered. When Ben came out to read the burial service over them with all the ship’s company standing around, he saw another, smaller—in fact, cat-size—grave had been dug not far from the two human ones that were themselves only a dozen yards or so from the ship.
He made no comment If the restless and lonely ghost of Sprocket was within range of his voice, it would do him neither harm nor good to hear words of a non-denomination burial service read over him. Ben read the words steadily. He felt drained by exhaustion, emotional as well as physical, and the phrases he spoke seemed to have little reality to him. He could not think that they had won any kind of victory. He could think only of John Edlung. John had been right, clairvoyantly right, in his belief that he would never live to see Earth again; and now he was dead, only because he had happened to be standing beside a man who spoke and invited the alien lightning. —But maybe that belief of John’s had caused him to make some small gesture that invited it, too.
Chapter 11
“We’ll go home,” said Ben.
It was a week since their landing on the Golden People’s world, a week since he had known that he must say these words and still he had to nerve himself to say them. A little sigh went through the group of senior officers sitting in his office as he spoke. They—Nora, Lee, and Coop,with Walt as the only possible exception—had been like all the rest aboard ship, longing for the day when they could turn the phase ship and their thoughts Earthward, once more. Their dreams of home were all bright dreams.
It was different with Ben. To turn back toward Earth, for him, was to turn back to face the judgment of law for what he had done in stealing the phase ship and kidnaping its crew. Trial—probably a general court-martial—certainly a long term of imprisonment, and quite possibly execution if a murder charge could be brought on the basis of the deaths among the crew, were what he must be ready to expect It was a prospect from which anyone could be excused for shrinking; and inside himself Ben was quite ready to shrink—except that if they did not return,and the phase ship brought back no word of new worlds for men, there would have been no point to everything that had been done so far.
There could be no question about their going back, now that they had found what they had come to find.
“For the record in the official log,” said Ben, speaking with the harshness he had found successful in hiding any leakage of his emotions into his voice, “I’d like to have your individual reactions to my own belief that we’ve done what we were sent out to do. Not only this world, but all the worlds the Golden People took f
rom the Gray-furs ought to be habitable by humans. And—going by what we’ve run into here, the few Golden People left on those worlds won’t be any obstacle to colonization.” He looked to his left. “Walt?”
“Yes,” said Walt—after a slight hesitation. “I agree with you.”
"Nora?”
“Yes.”
“Lee?”
“Yes ”
“Coop?”
“Yes,” said Coop. “They won’t even come near us now.You don’t even have to stand still to keep them from attacking you. They turn away so they can’t see you the minute you come into sight.”
It was true, thought Ben, grimly. As he had thought, that first day after watching them, the Golden People had degenerated almost to the animal level. The one trait remaining to them was the reflex to attack in the face of any challenge. But that attack, except in the case of the rare, ancient, javelin weapons that still worked slightly, was suicidal, facing the human guns.
It was possible that there was only one fully working alien weapon in the city—the one in the hands of the leader of those attacking the phase ship the first day. The other javelins the humans had seen were little more effective than flashlights with dying batteries, or they were carved imitations of the real thing. And the aliens carrying them were equally reduced in effectiveness. They had attacked the phase ship and looted it, evidently, out of reflex and instinct alone. All the loot they had taken the humans had found dropped and discarded the next day within short distances of the ship.
Since then, following the slaughter of their numbers the first day by Walt and those with him, they had begun to avoid the humans. At first the crew members needed to stand still to keep from triggering the attack reflex in the tall golden bodies. But lately, as Coop said, it was the aliens who turned away at die first chance of meeting.
“They’ve fallen apart worse than the Gray-furs,” said Nora.
That too was true, thought Ben. The Gray-furs had only ceased to develop as a race should. They had been caught and embalmed like an insect in amber, in a pose of fearful flight. They had been frozen in an image of the Conquerable.
The Golden People had been frozen in the far more destructive image of the Conquerors. It was not like amber, but acid, the character in which they had tried to embalm themselves. Friezes and murals on the inner walls of the buildings around the ship hinted at part of the story. The Golden People themselves had been driven from their own ancestral worlds, farther in toward the galaxy’s center, by a rotund, furry race that seemed to carry no weapons but yet were superior to the javelin weapons. Hunting for new homes, the Golden People had adopted the character of Conquerors, and after taking over the Gray-fur worlds, could not, or had not been able, to release themselves from those characters again.
Conquerors with nothing more to conquer, they had apparently fragmented as a people, fought with themselves, dwindled in number, and degenerated over the equivalent of a hundred thousand Gray-fur years, until now they were in worse condition than the race they had conquered. Ben felt a coolness like horror inside him at the thought of it. Here were two plain paths to racial death, one taken by the Gray-furs, one by the Golden People—and the human race would need to learn how to chart a path between, like a ship between hidden reefs, to survive.
". . . Soon?” Coop was saying. Ben woke to the fact that the others had been talking while he thought, and now Coop had asked about the time of lifting ship for Earth.
“If Stores are sufficient—” Ben turned to Nora, who nodded.
“Plenty, if we’re going to shift straight home,” she said. “I can take inventory of the Survival Stores if you want—water, food, and so forth.”
“Do that,” said Ben. He turned to Lee. “How about the outer airlock door where the bolt from that javelin weapon hit it?”
“It’s all right,” said Lee. “We’ve built up the burned-away part with welding rod and we’ll have it ground down to make a seal in another day. The hinges are fixed, the operating instruments the Golden People took that first day have all been found. We’re set.”
He had answered cheerfully, but he did not look directly at Ben as he spoke. In spite of being left in command of the ship, Lee had failed to keep Walt from arming the men and taking them out after the Golden People that first day. The failure had shown, for all to see, that Lee had no real authority. There was no way to give it to him, now. It was a cruel universe, thought Ben, in that sooner or later it put everyone to the test. Walt had been Lee’s test—Perhaps, thought Ben, remembering the moment in which he and Walt had stood with guns half aimed, face to face, Walt would end up being his test as well. With an effort Ben shoved that thought from his mind.
“Then there’s no reason not to leave in a day or two,”he said.
“No,” said Walt, now, unexpectedly. They all looked at him. “Provided,” he went on evenly, “we want to cut our stay here that short.”
Ben eyed this man he had known over half his life, but never fully understood, With a sudden new wariness.
“Our duty,” said Ben, “is to get back as soon as possible.”
“Yes,” said Walt. “That’s true. On the other hand, if anyone ever earned the right to this world, we have. But we’ve spent only one week on it—and if we go now, the chances are we’ll never see it again.”
He looked around from Ben at the others.
“Never see it again?” said Coop, after a moment, frowning. Ben opened his mouth and closed it again. At once there had burst on him a suspicion of what Walt was trying to do.
“There won’t have been any new phase ships under construction,” Walt was saying calmly to Coop, “seeing ours disappeared the way it did and hasn’t been heard from since. When we do get back to Earth, construction and phase ship work’ll have to start fresh. Even if they decide to use this ship again, it’ll need to be completely overhauled, no doubt with all sorts of changes and new wrinkles added.”
“But what’s that got to do with us?” asked Coop.
“Just,” said Walt, “that by the time the next ship’s ready to go out, three—maybe five—years’ll have gone by. And by that time there’ll be a surplus of new, young, specially trained astronauts ready to man it. The way this ship was intended to be manned in the first place. Nobody on this ship can ever reasonably hope to go beyond the solar system again in his lifetime.”
Walt stopped talking. All the time he had been speaking,he had never lifted his voice above its normal tones, and the quietness of his speech had made what he said doubly effective.
“But what can we do about it?” asked Lee, finally, a little hoarsely.
“I think we ought to stay a while,” said Walt. His eyes were not directly on Ben, but Ben felt that the words had a special direction toward him. “I think we owe ourselves that much—to learn about this world we’ve found. In fact—” Walt seemed to think for a moment, “it’s not an impossible thought that we might want to do something more. Set up permanent quarters here, residences, and some of us stay behind while the others go back . . . when they do. Possession may not be nine-tenths of the law, but it certainly gives us a claim. And it seems to me we’ve earned a claim, at the cost of seven lives lost out of twenty-four, to find these worlds.”
It was well argued. Over the months those aboard the phase ship had come to identify themselves with it, and with the worlds they were then searching for and now had found. The idea that what they had discovered might be forever barred to them, while men and probably women, who had not even been with them would follow the path they had blazed among the stars, had its effect At the same time that effect hid the fact that the argument was not actually aimed at them. Its true target was Ben, himself, the one person aboard who could actually do something about the phase ship staying on the Golden People’s world—if he should be so tempted.
And, for a moment, Ben could not deny to himself that he was tempted. The possibilities Walt’s words suggested leaped into being in Ben’s active mind like a seri
es of bright pictures. If a permanent settlement was made upon this world where the phase ship now sat he could remain behind with those who stayed while others went back. Not only that, but those who returned, in bargaining for recognition of their claims to these worlds, could also bargain for forgiveness for Ben himself. Of course, the rest aboard the phase ship did not yet know what Ben had done to them—but, weighing his crimes, once they knew them, in balance with the fact that he had made them part-owners of fourteen valuable worlds should surely win him some measure of their forgiveness.
Even if they would not fight for a pardon back on Earth for him, he could at least stay here and be safe, one of the founders of the new human society that would be springing up on here and on the other Golden Worlds—
The bright series of pictures disintegrated like the dreams they were. Of course he could not do any such things.
He had not struggled with this race of men and women with whom he so deeply longed to fit in, even while he despaired of ever fitting in with them, without learning that they shared his own faults—in a lesser degree, perhaps, but still they shared them. Like him, if there was a chance of doing things wrong, they would do them. He had learned long ago that only the selfless individual could be trusted to see a situation clear-headedly and carry it through to the end. Anyone who let selfish desires intrude developed a blind spot in the area of his selfishness, and on such blind spots plans were wrecked.
And Walt had selfish reasons for wanting the ship to stay. That much was plain. Ben, himself, on the other hand was selfless—not out of any particular virtue in him, but be-cause nothing he could ever do would make him one of those around him. The one way he could reach through the barrier of his outsiderness and touch other men and women of the world on which he had been born was to give them this new living space the way he had planned to do. If he failed in this, what good would it do him to extend the number of years in his own life, here, on a world far from home? Better facing a death sentence back on Earth than living on here, knowing his one worthwhile effort had foundered and failed because he was afraid to face the con-sequences of his own actions.
Mission to Universe Page 17