The Project Gutenberg eBook of The high ones
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Title: The high ones
Author: Poul Anderson
Release date: October 15, 2023 [eBook #71883]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1958
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HIGH ONES ***
THE HIGH ONES
By POUL ANDERSON
Illustrated by ED EMSH
_A mutiny had given the Whites control
of the starship--but that meant they
could never return to Red-ruled Earth!_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity June 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
CHAPTER I
When he first saw the planet, green and blue and cloudy white across
many cold stars, Eben Holbrook had a sense of coming home. He turned
from the viewport so that Ekaterina Ivanovna should not see the quick
tears in his eyes. Thereafter it became a long waiting, but his hope
upbore him and he stayed free of the quarrels which now flared in the
ship. Nerves were worn thin, three parsecs and fifty-eight years from
Earth; only those who found a way to occupy their hands could endure
this final unsureness. Because it might not be final. Tau Ceti might
have no world on which men could walk freely. And then it would be back
into the night of suspended animation and the night of unending space,
for no man knew how long.
Holbrook was not a scientist, to examine how safe the planet was for
rhesus monkeys and human volunteers. He was a nucleonics engineer.
Since his chief, Rakitin, had been killed in the mutiny, he was in
charge of the thermonuclear ion-drive. Now that the _Rurik_ swung in
orbit, he found his time empty, and he was too valuable for Captain
Svenstrup to accept him as a guinea pig down on the surface. But he had
an idea for improving the engines of the great spaceship's auxiliary
boats, and he wrapped himself in a fog of mathematics and made tests
and swore and returned to his computations, for all the weeks it took.
In spare moments he amused himself with biological textbooks, an old
hobby of his.
That was one way to stay out of trouble, and to forget the scorn in
certain hazel eyes.
The report came at last: as nearly as could be told, this world was
suitable for humans. Safer than Earth, in that so far no diseases had
seemed able to attack the newcomers; yet with so similar a biochemistry
that many local meats and plants were edible and the seeds and frozen
livestock embryos on the ship could surely thrive. Of course, it was
always possible that long-range effects existed, or that in some other
region--
"To hell with it," said Captain Svenstrup. "We're going down."
After such a word, he would have faced a mutiny himself had he decreed
otherwise.
* * * * *
They left the _Rurik_ in orbit and the boats gleamed through a high
blue heaven--with just the faintest tinge of purple, in this slightly
redder sunlight--to land on grass twin-bladed but soft and green, near
trees which swayed almost like poplars above a hurried chill river. Not
far away lifted steep, darkly forested hills, and beyond them a few
snow-peaks haunted the sky. That night fires blazed among temporary
shelters, folk danced and sang, accordions mingled with banjos, the
vodka bottle worked harder than the samovar, and quite likely a few new
human lives were begun.
There were two moons, one so close that it hurtled between
constellations not very different from those of home (what was ten
light-years in this god-sized cosmos?) and one stately in a clear
crystal dark. The planet's period of rotation was 31 hours, its axial
tilt 11°; seasons here would not be extreme. They named it New Earth
in their various languages, but the Russian majority soon had everyone
else calling it Novaya Zemlya, and that quickly became a simple Novaya.
Meanwhile they got busy.
There had been no sign of aborigines to dispute Paradise, but one
could never be certain, nor learn too much. Man had had a long time to
familiarize himself with Old Earth; the colonists must gain equivalent
information in months. So small aircraft were brought down and
assembled, and ranged widely.
Holbrook was taking a scout turn, with Ilya Feodorovitch Grushenko and
Solomon Levine, when they found the aliens.
It was several hundred kilometers from the settlement, on the other
side of the mountains. Suddenly the jet flashed over a wooded ridge,
and there was the mine pit, and the machines, and the spaceships.
"Judas priest!" gasped Holbrook. He crammed back the stick. The jet
spurted forward.
Grushenko picked up the mike and rattled a report. Only a tape recorder
heard it: they had too much work to do in camp. He slammed the mike
back down and looked grimly at the Americans. "We had best investigate
on foot, comrades," he said.
"Hadn't we better ... get back ... maybe they didn't see us go over,"
stammered Holbrook.
Grushenko barked a laugh. "How long do you expect them not to know
about us? Let us learn what we can while we can."
He was a heavy-muscled man, affecting the shaven pate of an Army
officer; he made no bones about being an unreconstructed sovietist, he
had killed two mutineers before they overpowered him and since then his
cooperation was surly. But now Levine nodded a bespectacled head and
put in: "He's right, Eben. We can take a walky-talky, and the jet's
transmitter will relay back to camp." He lifted a rifle from its rack
and sighed. "I had hoped never to carry one of these again."
"It may not be necessary," said Holbrook in a desperate voice. "Those
creatures ... they don't live here ... they _can't_! Why couldn't we
make an ... agreement--"
"Perhaps." A faraway light flickered in Grushenko's pale eyes. "Yes,
once we learn their language ... it might very well be possible, mutual
interest and--After all, their level of technology implies they have
reached the soviet stage of development."
"Oh, come off it," said Levine in English.
Holbrook used a downblast to land the jet in a meadow, a few kilometers
from the alien diggings. If the craft had not been noticed--and it
had gone over very quickly--its crew should be able to steal up and
observe.... He was glad of the imposed silence as they slipped among
great shadowy trees; what could he have said, even to Levine? That was
how it always went, he thought in a curious irrelevant anguish. He was
not much more nervous than the next man, but he had no words at the
high moments. His tongue knotted up and he stood like a wooden Indian
under the gaze of Ekaterina Ivanovna.
At the end of their walk, they stood peering down a slope through a
screen of brush. The land was raw and devastated, it must have been
worked for centuries. Holbrook remembered a survey report: curious
formations spotted all over the planet, pits hundreds of meters deep.
Yes, they must be the grass-grown remnants of similar mines, exhausted
and abandoned. How long had the aliens been coming here? The automatons
which purred about, digging and carrying, grinding, purifying, loading
into the incredibly big and sleek blue spaceships, were such as no one
on Earth had ever built.
Levine's voice muttered to a recorder beyond the mountains, "Looks like
rare-earth ores to me. That suggests they've been civilized long enough
to use up their home planet's supply, which is one hell of a long time,
my friends." Holbrook thought in a frozenness that it would be very
hard to describe the engines down there; they were too foreign, the eye
saw them but the mind wasn't yet prepared to register--
"They heard us! They are coming!"
Grushenko said it almost exultantly. Holbrook and Levine whirled about.
Half a dozen forms were moving at a trot up the slope, directly toward
the humans. Holbrook had a lurching impression of creatures dressed
in black, with purplish faces muffled by some kind of respirator
snout, two legs, two arms, but much too long and thin. He remembered
the goblins of his childhood, in a lost Maine forest, and a primitive
terror took him.
He fought it down just as Grushenko stepped out of concealment.
"Friends!" cried Grushenko. He raised both hands. "Friends!" The sun
gleamed on his bare head.
An alien raised a tube. Something like a fist struck Holbrook. He
went to his knees. A small hot crater smoked not two meters from
him. Grushenko staggered back, shooting. One of the aliens went on
its unhuman face. They deployed, still running to the attack. Another
explosion outraged the earth; fire crawled up a tree trunk. And
another. "Let's _go_!" yelled Holbrook.
He saw Levine fall. The little man stared surprised at the cooked
remnant of a leg. Holbrook made a grab for him. A gray face turned
up. "No," said Levine. He cradled his rifle and thumbed it to full
automatic. "No heroics, please. Get the hell back to camp. I'll hold
'em."
He began to shoot. Grushenko snatched at Holbrook's wrist. Both men
pounded down the farther hillside. The snarl of the Terrestrial rifle
and the boom of the alien blast-guns followed them. Through the
racket, for a second as he ran, Holbrook heard Levine's voice into
the walky-talky mike: "Four of 'em left. A few more coming out of the
spaceships. I see three in green clothes. The weapons seem ... oh,
Sarah, help me, the pain ... packaged energy ... a super-dielectric
maybe."
CHAPTER II
The officers of the _Rurik_ sat at a long rough table, under trees
whose rustling was not quite like that of any trees on Earth. They
looked toward Holbrook and Grushenko, and they listened.
"So we got the jet aloft," finished Holbrook. "We, uh, took a long
route home--didn't see any, uh, pursuit--" He swore at himself and sat
down. "That's all, I guess."
Captain Svenstrup stroked his red beard and said heavily: "Well, ladies
and gentlemen. The problem is whether we hide out for a while in hopes
of some lucky chance, or evacuate this system at once."
"You forget that we might fight!"
Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov said it in a voice that rang. The blood
leaped up in her wide, high-boned face; under her battered cap, Tau
Ceti tinged the short wheaten hair with copper.
"Fight?" Svenstrup skinned his teeth. "A hundred humans, one spaceship,
against a whole planet?"
The young woman rose to her feet. Even through the baggy green tunic
and breeches of her uniform--she had clung to it after the mutiny, Red
Star and all--she was big and supple. Holbrook's heart stumbled, rose
again, and hurried through a dark emptiness. She clapped a hand to her
pistol and said: "But they do not belong on this planet. They must be
strangers too, as far from home as we. Shall we run just because their
technology is a little ahead of ours? My nation never felt that was an
excuse to surrender her own soil!"
"No," mumbled Domingo Ximénez. "Instead you went on to plunder the soil
of everyone else."
"Quiet, there!" roared Svenstrup.
His eyes flickered back and forth, down the table and across the camp.
Just inside the forest, a log cabin stood half erected; but the Finnish
couple who had been making it now crouched with the rest of the crew,
among guns and silence. The captain tamped tobacco into his pipe and
growled: "We are all here together, Reds and Whites alike. We cannot
even return to Earth without filling the ship's reaction-mass tanks,
and we need a week or more just to refine enough water. Meanwhile,
non-humans are operating a mine and have killed one of us without any
provocation we can imagine. They could fly over and drop one nuclear
bomb, and that would be the end of man on Novaya. I'm astonished that
they haven't so far."
"Or haven't even been aware of us," murmured Ekaterina. "Our boats were
coming and going for a pair of months or three. Did they not notice our
jet trails above the mountains? Comrades, it does not make sense!"
Ximénez said very low: "How much sense would a mind which is not human
make to us?"
He crossed himself.
The gesture jarred Holbrook. Had the government of the United World
S.S.R. been _that_ careless? Crypto-libertarians had gotten aboard the
_Rurik_, yes, but a crypto-believer in God?
Grushenko saw the movement too. His mouth lifted sardonically. "I
would expect you to substitute word magic for thought," he declared.
To Svenstrup: "Captain, somehow, we have alarmed the aliens--possibly
we happen to resemble another species with which they are at war--but
their reasoning processes must be fundamentally akin to ours, simply
because the laws of nature are the same throughout the universe.
Including those laws of behavior first seen by Karl Marx."
"Pseudo-laws for a pseudo-religion!" Holbrook was surprised at himself,
the way he got it out.
Ekaterina lifted one dark brow and said, "You do not advance our cause
by name calling, Lieutenant Golbrok." Dryly: "Especially when the
epithets are not even original."
He retreated into hot-faced wretchedness. _But I love you_, he wanted
to call out. _If you are Russian and I am American, if you are Red and
I am White, is that a wall between us through all space and time? Can
we never be simply human, my tall darling?_
"That will do," said Svenstrup. "Let's consider practicalities. Dr.
Sugimoto, will you give us the reasons you gave me an hour ago, for
assuming that the aliens come from Zolotoy?"
Holbrook started. Zolotoy--the next planet out, gold-colored in the
evening sky--the enemy belonged to this same system? Then there was
indeed no hope but another plunge into night.
The astronomer rose and said in singsong Russian: "It is unlikely
that anyone would mine the planets of another star on so extensive a
scale. It does not appear economically feasible, even if one had a
spaceship which could travel nearly at light-velocity. Now long-range
spectroscopy has shown Zolotoy to have a thin but essentially
terrestroid atmosphere. The aliens were not wearing air suits, merely
some kind of respirator--I think probably it reduces the oxygen content
of their inhalations--but at any rate, they must use that gas, which
is only found free on Zolotoy and Novaya in this system. The high thin
bipedal shape also suggests life evolved for a lower gravity than
here. If they actually heard our scouts, such sensitive ears probably
developed in more tenuous air." He sat down again and drummed on the
table top with jittery fingers.
"I suppose we should have sent boats to all the other planets before
landing on this one," said Svenstrup heavily. "But there was too much
impatience, the crew had been locked up too long."
"The old captain would not have tolerated such indiscipline," said
Ekaterina.
"I won't tolerate much more from you, either." Svenstrup got his pipe
going. "Here is my plan, We must have more information. I am going to
put the _Rurik_ into an orbit skewed to the ecliptic plane, as safe
a hiding place as any. A few volunteers will stay hidden on Novaya,
refining reaction-mass water and maintaining radio contact with the
ship; everyone else will wait up there. One boat will go to Zolotoy and
learn what it can. Its crew will not know the _Rurik's_ orbit; they'll
report back here. Then we can decide what to do."
He finished grayly: "If the boat returns at all, of course."
Grushenko stood up. Something like triumph blazed in him. "As a
politico-military specialist, I have been selected and trained
for linguistic ability," he said. "Furthermore, I have had combat
experience in suppressing the Brazilian capitalist uprising. I
volunteer myself for the boat."
"Good," said Svenstrup. "We need about two more."
Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov smiled and said in her low, oddly gentle
voice, "If a Ukrainian like Comrade Grushenko goes, a Great Russian
must also be represented." Her humor faded and she went on earnestly,
overriding the captain, "My sex has nothing to do with it. I am a
gunnery officer of the World Soviet Space Fleet. I spent two years on
Mars, helping to establish a naval outpost. I feel myself qualified."
Somehow, Holbrook was standing up. He stuttered incoherently for a
moment. Their eyes speared him, a big square-faced young man with
rumpled brown hair, brown eyes nearsighted behind contact lenses, his
body drab in coveralls and boots. He got out finally: "Let Bunin take
my post. I, I, I can find out something about their machinery--"
"Or die with the others," said Svenstrup. "We need you here."
Ekaterina spoke quietly. "Let him come, captain. Shall not an American
also have the right to dare?"
CHAPTER III
The boat ran swiftly, accelerating on ion drive until Novaya was only
one blue spark of beauty and Zolotoy became an aureate shield. There
was much silence aboard. Watching his companions, Holbrook found time
to think.
Grushenko said at last, "There must be some point of agreement with
them. It is impossible that they could be imperialists."
Ekaterina curved her lips in a sad little grin. "Was it not impossible
that disloyal elements could get onto the _Rurik_?"
"There were traitors on the selection board," said Grushenko. His voice
darkened. "They were to choose from many nations; man's first voyage
beyond the sun was to be a symbol of the brotherhood of all men in
the World Soviets. And who did they pick? Svenstrup! Ximénez! Bunin!
Golbrok!"
"Enough," said the woman. "Now we have only one cause, to survive."
Grushenko regarded her from narrowed glacial eyes. "Sometimes I wonder
about your own loyalty, Comrade Saburov. You accepted the mutiny as
an accomplished fact, without even trying to agitate--you have fully
cooperated with Svenstrup's regime--this will not be forgotten when we
get back to Earth."
"Fifty years hence?" she gibed.
"Fifty years is not so long when one has frozen sleep." Grushenko gave
Holbrook a metallic stare. "It is true, we have a common interest at
the moment. But suppose the aliens can be persuaded to aid one of our
factions. Think of that, Comrade Saburov! As for you, Ami, consider
yourself warned. At the first sign of any such attempt on your part, I
shall kill you."
Holbrook shrugged. "I'm not too worried by that kind of threat," he
said. "You Reds are a small minority, you know. And the minority will
grow still smaller every year, as people get a taste for liberty."
"So far there has been nothing the loyal element could do," said
Ekaterina. The frigidity of her tone was a pain within him; but
he could not back down, even in words, when men had died in the
spaceship's corridors that other men might be free. "Our time will
come. Until then, do not mistake enforced cooperation for willingness.
Svenstrup was clever. He spent a year organizing his conspiracy. He
called the uprising at a moment when more Whites than Reds were awake
on duty. We others woke up to find him in charge and all the weapons
borne by his men. What could we do but help man the ship? If anything
went wrong with it, no one aboard would ever see daylight again."
Holbrook fumbled after a reply: "If the government at home is, uh, so
wonderful ... how did the selection board let would-be rebels like me
into the crew? They must have _known_. They must have hoped ... some
day the mutineers ... or their descendants ... would come back ... at
the head of a liberating fleet!"
"No!" she cried. Wrath reddened her pale skin. "Your filthy propaganda
has had some results among the crew, yes, but to make them all active
traitors--the stars will grow cold first!"
Holbrook heard himself speaking fluently; the words sprang out like
warriors. "Why not be honest with yourself?" he challenged. "Look at
the facts. The expedition was to have spent a total of perhaps fifty
years, at the most, getting to Alpha Centauri, surveying, planting a
colony if feasible, and returning to glory. To Earth! Suddenly, because
of a handful of rebels, every soul aboard found himself headed for
another sun altogether. It would be almost six decades before we even
got there. Not one of our friends and kin at home would be alive to
welcome us back, if we tried to return. But we wouldn't. If Tau Ceti
had no suitable planet, we were to go on, maybe for centuries. This
generation will never see home again.
"So why did you, why did all of them, not heed the few fanatics like
Grushenko, rise up and throw themselves on our guns? Was death too high
a price, even the death of the whole ship? Or if so, you still had many
years in which to engineer a counter-mutiny; all of you were awake
from time to time, to stand watches. Why didn't you even conspire?
"You know very well why not! You saw women and grown men crying with
joy, because they were free." Bitterness seared his tongue. "Even you
noisy Red loyalists have cooperated--under protest, but you have done
your assigned duties. Why? Why not set the crew an example? Why haven't
you even gone on strike? Isn't it because down inside, not admitting it
to yourself, you also know what a slave pen Earth has become?"
Her hand cracked across his face. The blow rang in him. He stood gaping
after her, inwardly numbed, as she flung from the control cabin into
the passageway beyond.
Grushenko nodded, not without compassion. "They may claim all the
equality they will, Eben Petrovitch," he said. It was the first time he
had offered that much friendship. "But they remain women. She will make
a good wife for the first man who fully comprehends this is true in her
own case too."
"Which I don't?" mumbled Holbrook.
Grushenko shook his head.
* * * * *
And the world Zolotoy grew. They decelerated, backing down upon it. A
few whirling electrons piloted them; they stared through telescopes
and held up photographs to the light, hardly believing.
"One city," whispered Ekaterina. "_One city!_"
Holbrook squinted at the picture. He was not a military man and had
no experience with aerial photographs. Even greatly enlarged, it
bewildered him. "A city over the whole planet?" he exclaimed.
Grushenko looked through the viewport. This close, the golden shield
was darkly streaked and mottled; here and there lay a metallic gleam.
"Well, perhaps twenty per cent of the total area," he replied. "But
the city forms a continuous webwork, like a net spread over the entire
oceanless globe. It is obviously a unit. And the open spaces are all
used--mines, landing sites, transmission stations, I suppose. It is
hard to tell, they are so different from any designs we understand."
"I imagine their food is synthetic," said Ekaterina. Her snub nose
wrinkled. "I should not like that. My folk have been peasants too many
centuries."
"There are no more peasants on Earth," said Grushenko stiffly. Then he
shook his hairless skull and clicked his tongue in awe. "But the size
of this! The power! How far ahead of us are they? A thousand years? Ten
thousand? A million?"
"Not too far ahead to murder poor old Solomon Levine," said the woman
raggedly. Holbrook stole a glance at her. Sweat glittered on the wide
clear brow. So she was afraid too. He felt that the fear knocking under
his own ribs would be less if he could have been warding her, but she
had been bleak toward him since their quarrel. _Well_, he thought, _I'm
glad she liked Solly. I guess we all did._
"There was some mistake," said Grushenko.
"The same mistake could kill us," said Holbrook.
"It is possible. Are you wishing you had stayed behind?"
The engines growled and grumbled. Fire splashed a darkness burning
with suns. At 7800 kilometers out they saw one of the sputniks already
identified on photographs. It was colossal, bigger than the _Rurik_,
enigmatic with turrets and lights and skeletal towers. It swung past
them in a silence like death; the sense of instruments, unliving eyes
upon him, prickled in Holbrook's skin.
Down and down. It was not really surprising when the spaceships came.
They were larger than the boat, sleekly aerodynamic. Presumably the
Zolotoyans did not have to bother about going into orbit and using
shuttle rockets; even their biggest vessels landed directly. The lean
blue shapes maneuvered with precision blasts, so close to absolute
efficiency that only the dimmest glow revealed any jets at all.
"Automatic, or remote-controlled," decided Holbrook in wonder. "Live
flesh couldn't take that kind of accelerations."
Fire blossomed in space, dazzling their eyes so they sat half blind for
minutes afterward. "Magnesium flares," croaked Grushenko. "In a perfect
circle around us. Precision shooting--to warn us they can put a nuclear
shell in our airlock if they wish." He blinked out the viewport.
Zolotoy had subtly changed position; it was no longer ahead, but below.
He chuckled in a parched way. "We are not about to offer provocation,
comrades."
Muted clanks beat through the hull and their bones. Holbrook saw each
whale shape as a curve in the ports, like a new horizon. "Two of them,"
said Ekaterina. "They have laid alongside. There is some kind of
grapple." She plucked nervously at the harness of her chair. "I think
they intend to carry us in."
"_We_ couldn't do that stunt," muttered Holbrook.
A day came back to him. He had been a country boy, remote even from
the collective farms, but once when he was seven years old he sent in
a winning Party slogan (he didn't know better then) and was awarded a
trip to Europe. Somehow he had entered alone that museum called Notre
Dame de Paris; and when he stood in its soaring twilight he realized
how helplessly small and young he was.
He cut the engines. For a moment free fall clutched at his stomach,
then a renewed pressure swiveled his chair about in the gymbals. The
scout boat was being hauled around Zolotoy, but downward: they were
going to some specific place on the planet for some specific purpose.
He looked through his loneliness at Ekaterina, and found her staring
at him. Angrily, she jerked her face away, reached out and grasped the
hand of Ilya Grushenko.
CHAPTER IV
On the way, the humans decompressed their atmosphere until it
approximated that of Zolotoy. There was enough oxygen to support
lethargic movement, but they donned small compression pumps,
capacitor-powered, worn on the back and feeding to a nose-piece. Their
starved lungs expanded gratefully. Otherwise they dressed in winter
field uniforms and combat helmets. But when Ekaterina reached for her
pistol, Grushenko took it from her.
"Would you conquer them with this, Comrade Saburov?" he asked.
She flushed. Her words came muffled through the tenuous air: "It might
give us a chance to break free, if we must escape."
"They could overhaul this boat in ten seconds. And ... escape where? To
interstellar space again? I say here we stop, live or die. Even from
here, it will be a weary way to Earth."
"Forget about Earth," said Holbrook out of tautness and despair. "No
one is returning to Earth before Novaya is strong enough to stand off a
Soviet fleet. Maybe you like to wear the Party's collar. I don't!"
Ekaterina regarded him for a long time. Even through the dehumanizing
helmet and nose-piece, he found her beautiful. She replied: "What kind
of freedom is it to become the client state of an almighty Zolotoy? The
Soviet overlords are at least human."
"Watch your language, Comrade Saburov!" snapped Grushenko.
They fell back into silence. Holbrook thought that she had pierced him
again. For surely it was true, men could never be free in the shadow of
gods. Even the most benign of super-creatures would breed fear and envy
and hatred, by their mere incomprehensible existence; and a society
riddled with such disease must soon spew up tyrants. No, better to flee
while they had a chance, if they still did at all. But how much longer
could they endure that devil's voyage?
The linked vessels fell downward on micrometrically controlled blasts.
When a landing was finally made, it was so smooth that for a moment
Holbrook did not realize he was on Zolotoy.
Then he unbuckled himself, went to the airlock controls and opened the
boat. His eardrums popped as pressures equalized; he stepped out into
a still, cold air, under a deep violet sky and a shrunken sun. The low
gravity made it wholly dreamlike.
Unthinkingly, the three humans moved close together. They looked down
kilometers of glass-slick blackness. A spaceship was landing far off;
machines rolled up to attend it, but otherwise there was no sign of
life. Yet the emptiness did not suggest decay. Holbrook thought again
of the bustle around a Terrestrial airport. It seemed grubby beside
this immense quietude.
The spacefield reached almost to the near horizon. At one end clustered
several towers. They must be two kilometers high, thought Holbrook
in the depths of an overwhelmed brain: half a dozen titanic leaps of
metal, but blended into a harmony which caught at his heart.
"There!"
He turned around. The Zolotoyans were approaching.
* * * * *
There were ten of them, riding on two small platforms: the propulsive
system was not clear, and Holbrook's engineer's mind speculated about
magnetic-field drives. They stood up, so rigid that not until the
flying things had grounded and the creatures disembarked could the
humans be quite sure they were alive.
There was about them the same chill beauty as their city bore. Two and
a half meters tall they stood, and half of it was lean narrow-footed
legs. Their chests and shoulders tapered smoothly, the arms were almost
cylindrical but ended in eerily manlike hands. Above slender necks
poised smooth, mask-faced heads--a single slit nostril, delicately
lipped mouths immobile above narrow chins, fluted ears, long amber eyes
with horizontal pupils. Their skins were a dusky hairless purple. They
were clad identically, in form-fitting black; they carried vaguely
rifle-like tubes, the blast-guns Holbrook remembered.
He thought between thunders: _Why? Why should they ignore us for
months, and then attack us so savagely when we dared to look at them,
and then fail to pursue us or even search for our camp?_
_What are they going to do now?_
Grushenko stepped forward. "Comrades," he said, holding up his hands.
His voice came as if from far away; the bare black spaces ate it
down, and Holbrook saw how a harshly suppressed fear glistened on the
Ukrainian's skin. But Grushenko pointed to himself. "Man," he said. He
pointed to the sky. "From the stars."
One of the Zolotoyans trilled a few notes. But it was at the others he
(?) looked. A gun prodded Holbrook's back.
Ekaterina said with a stiff smile: "They are not in a conversational
mood, Ilya Feodorovitch. Or perhaps only the commissar of interstellar
relations is allowed to speak with us."
Hands closed on Holbrook's shoulders. He was pushed along, not
violently but with firmness. He mounted one of the platforms. The
others followed him. They rose without sound into the air. Looking
back, Holbrook saw no one, no thing, on all the fused darkness of the
spaceport, except the machines unloading the other ship and a few
Zolotoyans casually departing from it. And, yes, the craft which had
borne down the Terrestrial boat were being trundled off, leaving the
boat itself unattended.
"Have they not even put a guard on our vessel?" choked Ekaterina.
Grushenko shrugged. "Why should they? In a civilization this advanced
there are no thieves, no vandals, no spies."
"But...." Holbrook weighed his words. "Look, though. If an alien ship
landed on your front step, wouldn't you at least be curious about it?"
"They may have a commissar of curiosity," said Ekaterina slyly. _Her
humor shows up at the damnedest times!_ thought Holbrook.
Grushenko gave her a hard glance. "How can you be sure, comrades, they
do not already know everything about us?" he answered.
Ekaterina shook her blonde head. "Be careful, comrade. I happen to
know that speculations about telepathy are classified as bourgeois
subjectivism."
Did she actually grin as she spoke? Holbrook, unable to share her
gallows mirth, lost his question, for now he was flying among the
towers, and so into the city beyond.
There was no Earth language for what he saw: soaring many-colored
pride, hundreds of meters skyward, stretching farther than his eyes
reached. Looped between the clean heights were elevated roadways; he
saw pedestrian traffic on them, Zolotoyans in red and blue and green
and white as well as black. There seemed to be association between the
uniform and the physical appearance: the reds were shorter and more
muscular, the greens had outsize heads--but he could not be sure, in
his few bewildered glimpses. Down below were smaller buildings, domes
or more esoteric curves, and a steady flow of noiseless traffic.
"How many of them are there?" he whispered.
"Billions, I should think." Ekaterina laid a chilled hand on his. Her
hazel eyes were stretched open with a sort of terror. "But it is so
still!"
Great blue-white flashes of energy went between kilometer-high spires.
Now and then a musical symbol quivered over the metal reaches of the
city. But no one spoke. There was no loitering, no hesitation, no
disorder, such as even the most sovietized city of Earth would know.
Grushenko shook his head. "I wonder if we can even speak with them," he
admitted in a lost voice. "What does a dog have to say to a man?" Then,
straightening himself: "But we are going to try!"
At the end of a long flight, they landed on a flange, dizzyingly
far above the street (?). Watching Zolotoyan hands on the platform
controls, Holbrook found the steering mechanism superbly simple. But
then he was urged through an arched doorway and down a dim corridor of
polished blue stone. He saw faint grooves worn in the floor. This place
was _old_.
Ekaterina whispered to him, "Eben Petrovitch,"--she had never so called
him before--"have you seen even one ornament here? One little picture
or calendar or ... anything? I would give a tooth for something humanly
small."
"The city is its own ornament," said Grushenko. His words came louder
than required.
They reached a dead-end wall. One of the black figures touched a stud,
and the wall dilated.
Beyond was a room so large that Holbrook could not make out its ceiling
through the sourceless muted radiance. But he saw the machine that
waited, tier upon tier where tiny red lights crawled like worms, and he
saw a hundred silent green-clad Zolotoyans move through the intricate
rituals of servicing it. "A computer," he mumbled. "In ten thousand
years _we_ may be able to build a computer like that."
A guard trilled to a technician. The technician waved calmly at some
others, who hurried to him. They conferred in a few syllables and
turned to the humans with evident purpose.
"_Gospodny pomiluie_," breathed Ekaterina. "It is a ... a routine! How
many like us have come here?"
Holbrook felt himself shoved onto a metal plate in the floor. He braced
himself for death, for enlightenment, for God. But the machine only
blinked and muttered. A technician stepped up with an instrument,
touched it to Holbrook's neck, and withdrew an unfelt few cubic
centimeters of blood. He bore it off into the twilight. Holbrook waited.
The machine spoke. It was hard to tell its voice from the sweet
Zolotoyan trills. The guards leveled their guns. Holbrook gasped and
ran toward Ekaterina. Two black giants caught and held him.
"By heaven," he found himself howling, foolish and futile melodrama in
the twilight, "if you touch her, you bastards--!"
"Wait, Eben Petrovitch," she called. "We can only wait."
Hands felt over his garments. An instrument buzzed. A Zolotoyan reached
into Holbrook's pocket and took out a jack-knife. His watch was pulled
off his wrist, the helmet off his head. "Judas priest," he exclaimed,
"we're being frisked!"
"Potential weapons are being removed," said Grushenko.
"You mean they don't bother to look at our spaceship, but can't tell
a watch isn't a deadly weapon--hey!" Holbrook grabbed at a hand which
fumbled with his air compressor.
"Submit," said Grushenko. "We can survive without the apparatus." He
began to point at objects, naming them. He was ignored.
CHAPTER V
Beyond the chamber was another hall, and at its end was another room.
It was a small, bare, windowless cell of the same blue stone. Dull
light came from the walls themselves, a waste-disposal hole opened
downward, a porous circle in the ceiling breathed fresh air. Otherwise
the place was featureless. When the black guards had urged the humans
through and the dilated wall had returned to a blank barrier, they were
alone.
They felt drained and light-headed in the thin atmosphere. Its dryness
caught at their throats and its cold gnawed toward their bones. But
most terrible, perhaps, was the silence.
Holbrook said at last, for them all: "Now what?"
Unhelmeted, Ekaterina's sunlight-colored hair seemed to crackle with
frost. Suddenly his living universe had narrowed to her--though he
could do worse, he thought in the dimness--with Grushenko hovering on
its fringes. Beyond, mystery; the stone walls enclosed him like the
curvature of space. The woman said with a forlorn boldness, the breath
smoking from her lips, "I suppose they will feed us. Else it would have
been most logical just to shoot us. But they do not seem to care if we
die of pneumonia."
"Can we eat their food?" muttered Holbrook. "The odds are against it,
I'd say. Too many incompatible proteins. The fact we can live on Novaya
is nearly a miracle, and Zolotoy isn't that Earthlike."
"They are not stupid," snorted Grushenko. "On the basis of our blood
samples they can synthesize an adequate diet for us."
"And yet they took our metallic possessions--even the most harmless."
Ekaterina sat down, shivering. "And that computer, did it not give them
orders? Is the computer the most powerful brain on this planet?"
"No." Holbrook joined her on the floor. Oxygen lack slowed his
thoughts, but he plowed doggedly toward an idea. "No, I don't believe
in robots with creative minds. That's what intelligence itself is
for. You wouldn't build a machine to eat for you, or ... or make
love ... or any truly human function. Machines are to help, to amplify,
to supplement. That thing is a gigantic memory bank, a symbolic logic
manipulator, what you like; but it is not a personality."
"But then why did they _obey_ it?" she cried.
Grushenko smiled wearily. "I suppose a clever dog might wonder why a
man obeys his slide rule," he said.
"A good enough analogy," said Holbrook. "Here's my guess. It's obvious
the Zolotoyans have been civilized for a very long time. So I imagine
they visited all the nearer stars ... ages ago, maybe. They took data
home with them. That computer is, as Ekaterina said a few hundred years
back, the commissar of interstellar relations. It has all the data. It
identifies us, our home planet--"
"Yes, of course!" exclaimed Grushenko. "At this moment, the rulers of
Zolotoy--whatever they have, perhaps the entire population--they are
studying the report on us!"
Ekaterina closed her eyes. "And what will they decide?" she asked in a
dead voice.
"They will send someone to learn our language, or teach us theirs,"
said Grushenko. A lift of excitement came to him, he paced up and down,
his boots clacked on the floor and his face became a harsh mask of
will. "Yes. The attack on us at the mine was a mistake of some kind.
We must assume that, comrades, because if it was not we are certainly
doomed. Now we have a chance to reason with them. And they can restore
the rightful captaincy to the _Rurik_!"
Holbrook looked up, startled. After a moment: "What makes you so sure
they will?"
"There is much we can offer them--it may be necessary to conceal
certain elements, in the interests of the larger truth, but--"
"Do you expect to fool a superman?"
"I can try," said Grushenko simply. "Assuming that there is any need
to. Actually, I think they are sure to favor the Red side. Marxist
principles would seem to predict that much. However...."
A minute longer he rubbed his jaw, pondering. Then he planted himself,
big and heavy, in front of Holbrook. He looked down from his height and
snapped: "I will be the only one who talks to them. Do you understand?"
The American stood up. The motion made his head swim. But he cocked
his fists and said in anger, "Just how do you expect to prevent me ...
comrade?"
"I am the better linguist," said Grushenko. "I am sure to be talking to
them while you still flounder about trying to tell the syllables apart.
But there are two sovietists here. Between us we can forbid you even to
attempt it."
Holbrook stared at the woman. She rose too, but backed away. One hand
lifted to her mouth. "Ilya Feodorovitch," she whispered. "We are three
human creatures."
"Comrade Saburov," said Grushenko in an iron tone, "I make this a test
of your loyalty. If you wish to commit treason, now is your time."
Her gaze was wild upon Holbrook. He saw the tides of blood go through
her skin, until they drained and she stood white and somehow empty.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, comrade."
"Good." Warmth flowed into the deep voice. Grushenko laid his hands
upon her shoulders, searched her eyes, suddenly embraced her. "Thank
you, Ekaterina Ivanovna!" He stepped back, and Holbrook saw the heavy
hairless face blush like a boy's. "Not for what you do," breathed
Grushenko. "For what you are."
She stood quiet a long time. Finally she looked at Holbrook with eyes
gone cat-green and said like a mechanism: "You understand you will keep
yourself in the background, say nothing and make no untoward gestures.
If necessary, we two can kill you with our hands."
And then suddenly she went to a corner, sat down and hugged her knees
and buried her face against them.
* * * * *
Holbrook lowered himself. His heart thuttered, wild for oxygen; he felt
the cold strike into his throat. He had not been so close to weeping
since the hour his mother died.
But--
He avoided Grushenko's hooded stare; he retreated into himself and
buckled on the armor of an engineer's workaday soul. There were
problems to solve; well, let them be solved, as practical problems in
a practical universe. For even this nightmare planet was real. Even it
made logical sense; it had to, if you could only see clearly.
He faced a mighty civilization, perhaps a million years old, which
maintained interplanetary travel, giant computers, all the intricacies
of a technology he did not begin to comprehend. But it ignored the
unhidden human landings on Novaya. But it attacked senselessly when
three strangers appeared--and then did not follow up the attack. It
captured a space vessel with contemptuous ease, did not even bother to
look at the booty, shoved the crew through an obviously cut-and-dried
routine and then into this cell; but cosmos crack open, visitors from
another star could not be an everyday affair! And it was understandable
the Zolotoyans would remove a prisoner's knife, but why his watch?
Well, maybe a watch could be turned into a, oh, a hyperspatial lever.
Maybe they knew how to pull some such stunt and dared not assume the
strangers were ignorant of it. But if so, why didn't they take some
precautions with the outworld spaceship? Hell, it could be a nuclear
time bomb, for all they knew--
The uniforms, the whole repulsive discipline, suggested a totalitarian
state. Could the humans only have encountered a few dull-witted
subordinates so far? That would fit the facts.... No, it wouldn't
either. Because the overlords, who were not fools, would certainly have
been informed of this, and would have taken immediate steps.
Or would they?
Holbrook gasped. "God in heaven!"
"What?" Grushenko trod over to him. "What is it?"
Holbrook struggled to his feet. "Look," he babbled, "we've got to break
out of here. It's our death if we don't. The cold alone will kill us.
And if we don't get back soon, the others will leave this system. I--"
"You will keep silent when the Zolotoyans arrive," said Grushenko. He
raised a fist. "If they do plan to terminate us, we must face it. There
is nothing we can do about it."
"But there is, I tell you! We can! Listen--"
The wall dilated.
CHAPTER VI
Three guards stood shoulder to shoulder, their guns pointed inward,
their lovely unhuman faces blank. A red-clad being, shorter than
they, set down a bowl of stew and a container of water. The food was
unidentifiable, but its odor was savory. Holbrook felt sure it had
been manufactured for the Terrestrials.
"For the zoo!" he said aloud. And then, wildly: "No, for the filing
cabinet. File and forget. Lock us up and throw away the key because
_there is nothing else they can do with us_."
Ekaterina caught his arm. "Back," she warned.
Grushenko stood making gestures and talking, under the golden eyes of
the guards. They loomed over him like idols from some unimaginable
futurism. And suddenly the hatred which seethed in Holbrook left him;
he knew nothing but pity. He mourned for Zolotoy the damned, which had
once been so full of hope.
But he must live. His eyes turned to Ekaterina. He heard the frosty
breath rattle in her nostrils. Already the coryza viruses in her
bloodstream were multiplying; chill and oxygen starvation had weakened
her. Fever would come within hours, death within weeks. And Grushenko
would spend weeks trying to communicate. Or if he could be talked
around to Holbrook's beliefs, it might be too late: that electronic
idiot-savant might decide at any moment that the prisoners were safest
if killed--
"I'm sorry," said Holbrook. He punched Ekaterina in the stomach.
She lurched and sat down. Holbrook side-stepped the red Zolotoyan,
moved in under the guards, and seized a blast-gun with both hands. He
brought up his foot in the same motion, against a bony black-clad knee,
and heaved.
The Zolotoyan reeled. Holbrook staggered back, the gun in his hands.
The other two guards trilled and slewed their own weapons about.
Holbrook whipped the blaster up and squeezed its single switch.
Lightning crashed between blue walls.
A signal hooted. Automatic alarms--there would be guards coming,
swarming all over, and their only reaction was to kill. "The computer!"
bawled Holbrook. "We've got to get the computer!" Two hideously charred
bodies were collapsing. The stench of burnt flesh grabbed his gullet.
"You murdering fool!" Grushenko roared it out, leaping at him. Holbrook
reversed his blaster and struck with the butt. Grushenko fell to the
floor, dazed. The third black Zolotoyan fumbled after a dropped gun.
Holbrook destroyed him.
"The computer," he shouted. "It's not a brain, only an automaton."
He reached down, caught Ekaterina by the wrist and hauled her up.
His heart seemed about to burst; rags of darkness swirled before his
eyes. "But it _is_ the interstellar commissar," he groaned. "It's the
only thing able to decide about us ... and now it's sure to decide on
killing--"
"You're insane!" shrieked the woman, from light-years away. She clawed
after his weapon. He swayed in black mists, batted her away with his
own strengthless hands.
"I haven't time now," he whispered. "I love you. Will you come with me?"
He turned and staggered through the door, past the scuttering red
servitor, over the corpses and into the hall. The siren squealed before
him, around him, through him. His feet were leaden clogs; Christ, what
had become of the low gravity--_help me, help me_.
Hands caught his arm. "Lean on me, Eben Petrovitch," she said.
They went down a vaulted corridor full of howling. His temples beat,
as if his brain were trying to escape the skull, but vision cleared a
little. He saw the wall at the end. He stopped by the control stud.
"Let me go through first," he said in his burning throat. "If the
guards get me, remember the computer must be destroyed. We're safe if
it can be destroyed. Wait, now."
The wall gaped for him. He stepped through. The green technicians moved
serenely under the huge machine, servicing it as if he did not exist.
_In a way_, he thought, _I don't_. He sped across the floor. His boots
resounded hollowly on the stone. He came up to the machine and opened
fire.
Thunder roared in the chamber. The technicians twittered and ran around
him. One of them posted himself at a board whose pattern of signaling
lights was too intricate for men to grasp, and called out orders. The
others began to fetch replacement parts. And the siren yammered. It was
like no alarm on Earth; its voice seemed almost alive.
Four guards burst in from the outer hall. Holbrook sprang behind a
technician, who kept stolidly by his rank of levers. The guards halted,
stared around, and began to cast about like sniffing dogs. Holbrook
shot past the green Zolotoyan, dropped one, dropped two. A human would
have sacrificed the enemy's living shield to get at the enemy; but
no black had ever fired on a green. Another guard approached and was
killed. But where had the fourth gotten to?
Holbrook heard the noise and whirled about. The gaunt shape had been
almost upon him, from the rear. Ekaterina had attacked. They rolled
about the floor, she snarling, he with a remote god-like calm even
as he wrestled. He got her by the throat. Holbrook ran up behind and
clubbed his blaster. After more blows than a man could have survived,
the guard slumped.
The woman crawled from beneath, gasping. Holbrook's strength was fled,
his lungs one enormous agony. He sank to the floor beside her. "Are you
all right?" he forced. "Are you hurt, my dearest?"
"Hold."
They crouched side by side and turned faces which bled from the nose
back toward the machine. Ilya Grushenko stood there. A blaster was
poised in his hands. "Drop your gun or I shoot," he said. "You and her
both."
Holbrook's fingers went slack. He heard the remote clatter of his
weapon as it struck stone.
"Thank you, Eben Petrovitch," said Grushenko. "Now they have it proven
to them which of our factions is their friend."
"You don't understand!" choked Holbrook. "Listen to me!"
"Be still. Raise your hands. Ah, there--" Grushenko flicked eyes toward
a pair of guards trotting into the room. "I have them, comrades!" he
whooped.
Their fire converged on him. He ceased to be.
Holbrook had already scooped up his own blaster. He shot down the two
black Zolotoyans. He stood up, swaying and still scrabbling after air.
Ekaterina huddled at his feet. "You see," he said wearily, "we are in
the ultimate collectivist state." She clung to his knees and wept.
He had not fired many bolts into the computer when its siren went
quiet. He assumed that the orders it had been giving were thereby
canceled. He took the woman and they walked away from the pathetically
scurrying greens, out into the hallway, past a few guards who ignored
them, and so to a flying platform.
CHAPTER VII
Under the tall fair heaven of Novaya, Holbrook spoke to the chief of
the human outpost. "You can call them back from the _Rurik_," he said.
"There is no more danger."
"But what are the Zolotoyans?" asked Ximénez. His eyes went in fear
toward the mountains. "If they are not intelligent beings, then who ...
what ... created their civilization?"
"Their ancestors," said Holbrook. "A very long time ago. They were
great once. But they ended up with a totalitarian government. A place
for everyone and everyone in his place. The holy society, whose very
stasis was holy. Specialized breeds for the different jobs. Some crude
attempts at it have been made on Earth, too. Egypt didn't change for
thousands of years after the pyramids had been built. Diocletian, the
Roman emperor, made all occupations hereditary. The Soviets are trying
that sort of thing at this moment, if they haven't been overthrown
since we left. The Zolotoyans were unlucky: their attempt succeeded."
He shrugged. "When one individual is made exactly like another--when
independent thought is no longer needed, is actually forbidden--what
do you expect? Evolution gets rid of organs which have stopped being
useful. That includes the thinking brain."
"But all that you saw--space travel, police functions, chemical
analysis and synthesis, maintaining those wonderful machines--it is all
done by instinct?" protested Ximénez. "No, I cannot believe it!"
"Instinct isn't completely rigid, you know," said Holbrook. "Even a
simple one-loop homeostatic circuit is amazingly flexible and adaptive.
Remember ants or bees or termites on Earth. In their own way, they have
societies as intricate as anything known to me. They even have a sort
of stylized language, as do our neighbors here. Actually, I suspect
the average ant faces more variety and challenge in his life than does
the ordinary Zolotoyan. Remember, they have no natural enemies any
more; and for tens of thousands of years, all the jobs on that highly
automated planet have been stereotyped.
"The mine guards on Novaya ignored our rocket trails beyond the
mountains because--oh, to their perception it couldn't have been
very different from lightning, say. But they had long ago evolved an
instinct to shoot at unknown visitors, simply because large Novayan
animals could interfere with operations. At home, they have little or
no occasion to fight. But apparently they, like the green technicians,
have an inborn obedience to the computer signals."
"Yes," said Ximénez. "The computer, what was it?"
Holbrook sighed. "I suppose it was built in the last dying age of
reason. Some atavistic genius (how lonely he must have been!) realized
what was happening. Sooner or later, visitors from space were sure to
arrive. He wanted to give his descendants at least a little defense
against them. He built that machine, which could try to identify them,
could give a few simple orders about their disarmament and care and
feeding, that sort of thing. He used some controlled-mutation process
to breed the technicians that serviced it, and the obedience of the
guards. Or perhaps it was enough to institute a set of laws. There'd be
natural selection toward an instinct.... It really wasn't much he could
do. A poor, clumsy protection against diseases we might have carried,
or wanton looting, or...."
Holbrook lifted his face into the wind. Sunlight streamed through
summer leaves, it fell like a benediction on him and on the young woman
who held his hand. Now, when the technical problem was disposed of, his
voice came more slowly and awkwardly:
"I could pity the Zolotoyans, except that they're beyond it. They are
as empty of selfhood as insects. But the one who built the computer,
can't you almost hear him back in time, asking for our mercy?"
Ximénez nodded. "Well," he said, "I do not see why we should not let
the ... fauna ... live. We can learn a great deal from them."
"Including this:" said Holbrook, "that it shall not happen to our race.
We've a planet now, and a whole new science to master. Our children or
our grand-children will return to Earth."
Ekaterina's hand released his, but her arm went about his waist,
drawing him close as if he were a shield. Her eyes ranged the great
strange horizon and she asked, very low, "After all that time here, do
you think they will care about Earth?"
"I don't know," said Holbrook. He tasted the light like rain on his
uplifted face. It was not the sun he remembered. "I don't know,
dearest. I don't even know if it matters."
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