First Cycle, page 12
Orv-Gorov bent his head. "Unfathomable are the ways of Vran," he said.
"There's a great mission and a great opportunity for you, Dean of Archpriests," Krav-Torov said.
"Consider: the inhabitants of other worlds, now that we admit to the existence of other worlds, may well be ignorant of the sacred truths of The Books of Tisse, and all else concerning Vran. It will be our duty to instruct them. You must start preparing brain-cells for this function."
"That is so," Orv-Gorov said, thoughtfully.
"And we must make plans to acquaint them with the advantages of the scientific structure of the Organic State."
"I wonder if these people-things-whatever they are-in the circling vessel have landed anywhere,"
Tav-Frakov, the Deputy Controller of Food Production said. "Perhaps, if they have, we could find them and amputate them. Then we could take their ship for study, and get rid of all other signs of their presence, and pass the whole thing off as a miracle. Within a few years the event will be forgotten."
Several of the others murmured agreement. Krav-Torov grimaced and slammed both hands down on the table-top. "Great Vran, pity me, who am advised by imbeciles!" he cried. "Do you think those who circle our world are the only inhabitants of their world, or that their vehicle of space is unique?"
"No, Citizen Successor-Controller. That is why I advised amputating those who may have landed here."
"Yes? And have you thought beyond your nose? Have you considered what would happen then? Has it occurred to you that those who sent this space-vehicle will miss it when it fails to return? That they -will send further vehicles to find out what happened? That if they discover that their representatives have been amputated, they might not be pleased?" He glared at all those around him. "Have we the technology to build such a machine? No! Therefore it is clear that the residents of the Horizon Object are scientifically and technically in advance of us. What sort of weapons do you suppose such people would have, knives and clubs?"
"But then, if they are our technological superiors, they may conquer us if we allow them a foothold here."
Krav-Torov shook his head. "If they don't hear from this expedition, then they'll only send a bigger expedition-one big enough to land in force and start operations against us. But if we receive the first party in friendship, we may postpone hostilities at least long enough to learn just what we have to deal with. If we're careful and clever, we can keep them off guard. They will be able to tell, without much dispute, that they are our technological superiors. This may lull them into thinking that they are also our superiors in other ways. They will not feel threatened, and will remain friendly. It will be to their advantage to be friendly at first. Although our technological superiors, they will be vastly outnumbered."
"That is so," someone agreed.
"We will, therefore, keep them friendly as long as possible, and at least long enough to learn their science before a war starts. And, Citizens, I have enough faith in the holy religion of Tisse and the Organic State to believe that, given time, we will outstrip them. Then we shall see whose planet is conquered by whom!"
Vandro Hannaro, waiting at Storm Valley Rendezvous, watched the disc of Shining Sister grow in his television screen, as the camera in the nose of the rocket sped toward it. The voices of Dantro Fanzagarro, the pilot, and Karnna Lassantro, the instrumenter, and Lylla Rovorrido, came through, describing the effects of the acceleration they had endured-much less serious than had been predicted-and laughing about their misadventures in the unfamiliar weightlessness.
Time passed. The watchers worked in shifts, staring at the screen and discussing the problems that came up with the crew. The Horizon Islands grew larger and plainer, and many of the smaller islands of the Central Sea became visible. Then the spacecraft skipped by the rim of the planet, and passed it, and the gravity of Shining Sister checked it in its arrow-straight path, reached out and pulled it into a parabolic orbit. For the first time the watchers saw the seven continents of Shining Sister surrounding the Central Sea, and the great, shallow expanse of ocean that was the invisible side.
"We have picked up radio signals from below," Karnna reported. "I don't know what it means, but every radio transmitter on the planet is sending the same thing-voices speaking, and what sounds like chanting in regular poetic meter."
"Maybe they have picked you up on radar, if they have radar, and are welcoming you," Vandro suggested.
"That could be. At any rate, we have started broadcasting our friendship message on the same wave-length; so they'll certainly pick it up. We're going to be passing behind the planet in a few seconds, so it will be a while before you hear from us again. Think good thoughts."
"All right. We'll be waiting to hear from you when you come around. Be careful with your fuel; don't get carried away and try to go too low. You'll need it for maneuvering your way back here."
The screen went gray, and a second later the carrier wave of the radio vanished. Vandro rose stiffly and went to a couch. The others turned from the screens, some to lie down, some for food and tea, and some of the less weary just to sit around and talk.
Somebody shook Vandro awake when the screens came to life again, with a beautiful view of their own planet as seen around the crescent arm of Shining Sister. A short time later Dantro Fanzagarro's voice came over the speakers.
"Vandro, your mother was right; they are afraid of us. I don't know what all the chanting and yelling was about, but it certainly wasn't to welcome us. Almost as soon as we began sending on their wavelength, everything stopped. We haven't been able to raise anything since."
"Maybe they are keeping radio silence to better receive you."
"I don't believe it. We varied the recorded message with our own voices. We sent them number-series signals. We tapped things out with a buzzer. We tried everything. It just wasn't any use. As soon as we began sending, their stations all went off the air. We did get some great pictures of the surface with the telephoto cameras. We saw cities, towns, ships, even a few aircraft flying below us. The aircraft seemed fairly primitive, to my eyes."
The return trip took six sleep-periods. The watchers at Storm Valley and on Skystabber, and at thousands of stations around the Outer Hemisphere slept only in fitful snatches, and not at all when the rocket entered its series of braking elipses. The whole planet held its breath until the ram-jet engines on the wingtips gulped in enough air and flamed into life. And when it bellied down for a perfect landing along the ten-kilolance runway prepared in the middle of the Burning Desert, telephone bells jangled in the editorial offices of a thousand newspaper gangs, whistles and bells and cannon proclaimed that the first voyagers to Shining Sister had returned safely.
The photographs taken on the spiral sweep over the Outer Hemisphere were carefully developed, enlarged, and examined. They were able to confirm Dantro's opinion that he had seen cities and towns down below. Under high resolution, they were' even able to make out individual houses, squares, some roads and other artifacts. It was clearly a densely-populated, and apparently a highly-civilized world.
Imagination supplied innumerable details; arguments grew heated. Maps were made. And all Hetaira resolved as one that someday, as soon as possible, a landing must be made.
The Alvararro Gang had already developed a nuclear-power rocket engine which could be used as an out-of-atmosphere auxiliary drive for space ships. Because its exhaust was poisonously radioactive, it could not be used to supply power for takeoffs and landings. After considering many possibilities, it was decided to build a large nuclear-powered ship to go into orbit around Shining Sister, and chemical shuttle-rockets for planetary landings. The amount of fuel necessary to rise to a low orbit and intersect a waiting mother-ship was much less than the amount needed for a high orbit, or for free flight in space.
The work took years. A whole technology had to be created to build a large object in space. The shuttle-rockets themselves were perfected during this period, by the simple expedient of building them at a rate sufficient to put one into orbit about every ten sleep-periods. The rockets lifted structural materials Page 58 and supplies and oxygen and fuel and water and food and workers. And slowly, with many a change in detail as new things were learned along the way, the spaceship grew in low orbit around the planet.
When finished, the ship was a huge globe, which could carry a crew of fifty; it could stay in space, fully manned, for a number of years. She carried six long shuttle-rockets, each twice the size of the one which had made the circuit around Shining Sister ten years before. Her captain was the man who had given the project his single-minded devotion from his mother's breast, Vandro Hannaro.
* * *
Chapter Twelve
Two hundred hours after she had blasted out of her orbit around the home planet, theSister's Visitor was in orbit above her destination. This time there was no attempt at contact by radio. Shuttle Rocket Number One was launched even as the ship's orbit was being stabilized. It spiraled over the Outer Hemisphere inside the atmosphere, using ramjet power to pull it quite close to the surface several times, and rocket-assisted jet to take it back out again. By the timeSister's Visitor began its second orbit, two planetary diameters from the surface, the shuttle rocket was locked back in its pad, and the film from its specially-designed cameras was already on the drying-racks.
As the photographs were studied and analyzed, the space ship slowly spiraled closer to the planet, to take up an orbit a mere one-third of a planetary diameter off. A primary landing site was picked for the delta-winged shuttle craft, and four of them dropped free of the ship and jetted in toward the planet.
Vandro Hannaro piloted the lead shuttle; his copilot was Lylla Rovorrido, the girl who had won a place on the first expedition ten years before. With them were a physicist from the Balkadranna Gang, named Yssa, and Zandro Garvanno", the biologist. The two shuttle-craft that followed him down were piloted by Dantro Fanzagarro and Karnna Lassantro, the other members of the first expedition; they carried only pilot and copilot, and were loaded with enough fuel to enable at least one of the three to return to the mother ship. The fourth shuttle-craft, instead of landing with the other three, used its ramjet engines to explore the planet from the upper atmosphere.
They had selected the long, narrow continent, which, as they would learn, was named Dudak; and they had picked an area of what looked like open farmland, cross-gridded with roads, some thirty kilolances south of a large town. There were, Vandro saw, a small clump of buildings with flat roofs, and several tall smokestacks. It could be the village of a sugar-planting gang. He glanced back and forth between the map made from the aerial photographs to the screen connected with the pickups on the wing-tips, which gave a binocular view of the ground ahead, clear of the retro-fire jet-flames.
If it was a sugar plantation, they got their sugar from something entirely different from the tubers grown on his own world; the crop seemed to be high stuff, for there was a distinct shadow-line between the standing and harvested areas. There was a section already harvested, big enough to set down all three rockets, using the short-field stall-and-drop landing techniques that had been worked out and practiced time after time over the past three years. It was about five hundred lances from the clump of flat-roofed buildings. They were down to two hundred lances, now, with the ramjet engines firing at full thrust.
Below, they had been seen. There were vehicles on the roads, and small dots that must be people in the fields; and all were hurrying frantically away from where the shuttle craft were going to come down. As they dropped a bit further, Vandro could see that the people were reassuringly humanoid-erect bipeds, with two visible arms.
"Take control, Lylla. Put her down so that our triangle apex will point toward that village. Over about there," he indicated on the screen. "That should give you enough room."
Lylla glanced critically at the indicated area. "With a whole lance to spare, I'd say," she said.
"I have confidence in you," Vandro told her. He picked up the hand-phone and called the two shuttles behind him. "Follow us in. Maintain the fifty-lance triangle. Kwalvo, do you hear me? Where are you?"
The pilot of the shuttle that wasn't landing called in, "Kwalvo to Vandro. I hear you easily. I am about three hundred kilolances away now, doing a photo run over what looks like a small industrial city. I'll be over your landing-site in about ten minutes, when you need me for the fireworks."
"Good. Stay about four thousand lances up, when you come in. Be ready to drop lower if the natives prove too hostile for the display, as planned. If it turns out that we need a bombing run, I'll want extreme precision."
"You'll get it," Kwalvo promised.
Yssa Balkadranna flipped the switch on the big screen in front of them to show the feed from the rotating scanner in the nose of the shuttle. "Take a look, Vandro," she called, "There's some kind of aircraft headed toward us from the direction of the village. I'm not sure, but I think it just took off from there.
Can't tell yet whether it intends to be hostile."
"Okay, Yssa. Lylla, put us down." He studied the image on the screen. The plane was a big thing, a low-wing monoplane with twin jets on pods above each wing. It looked like a transport.
Lylla brought the shuttle down, cutting the jets. It bumped along the field for a few seconds, as the great flaps extended and killed the remaining speed. The other shuttles came in right behind it, taking their places on the ground in an equilateral triangle.
Vandro unstrapped himself from his seat, taking his pistol belt and putting it on. The others were freeing themselves; Yssa slung a belt of hand-grenades, and Zandro checked the clip on an auto-carbine and then slung it over his shoulder.
At the last second, Vandro picked up the microphone. "Okay, we're going out," he said. "Now, excuse me for repeating this, but I'd rather be neurotically redundant than miss something. We simply can't have this first contact with Our Sister's Children ruined by bloodshed. So I must go beyond 'don't start anything' to 'don't use your weapons unless it looks like they're going to massacre us,' and then, let me add, shoot to disable rather than kill."
The native aircraft, a broad-winged, coppery gleaming contraption, was circling over them at about a hundred and fifty lances. As Vandro watched it on his screen, it opened a pair of doors in its belly; a maneuver that reminded him of the explosive-dropping aircraft of the Rim Country oil wars of the Fifth Century. He wondered what sort of explosives these people used, and how badly it could damage the titanium skin of the shuttle-craft. If it damaged the exterior heat-shield, it would not prevent the shuttles from taking off and rejoining the mother ship in orbit, so that wasn't an immediate worry. Although the carbon-filament skin would have to be repaired before they could come back down again.
"Dantro, Karnna; cancel that instruction to exit now. Keep your airlocks closed," he yelled into the microphone. "Kwalvo! Hurry on over here. I think we need your demonstration of moral superiority about now. There's a plane buzzing us that needs impressing."
"Kwalvo to Vandro; on our way. Watch for us at about two hundred lances over that airplane."
Rylla was operating the lateral pickup manually, and now she rotated it to keep the circling airplane centered. It seemed undecided as to what to do. Either waiting for some first move by them, Vandro thought, or waiting for some word from a distant decision-maker. Vandro switched on the exterior microphones, and from them came two distinct noises; the sound of the big four-jet aircraft overhead, and a high, intermittent screaming that might be some sort of alarm siren from the village.
Then, suddenly, came a third sound that drowned out everything else-a deafening, ear-battering roar, like a great waterfall, a huge blast furnace, and a continuous thunderstorm combined. A wide ribbon of red smoke appeared in the cloud-fleeced blue sky, curving in a full circle around the three grounded shuttlecraft. The copper-glistening aircraft banked to the left, turned quickly, and shot away out of the circle.
"Smart boy," Vandro commented. "He's never seen anything like that before, and has no idea of what it is. And, whatever it turns out to be, he doesn't want any part of it. All right, let's open her up and go outside."
They rotated the airlock open and extended the elevator. The other two shuttle-craft were also unbuttoning; they could see Dantro and Karnna and their co-pilots, also armed and laden with equipment, come dropping down the seven-lance descent to the ground. "That ought to impress any native who's watching," Vandro said, climbing sedately into the elevator. "It impresses me."
High overhead, Kwalvo Yarragarro was making another circle, a hundred lances higher, and five hundred wider; but this time without the noise. When he had finished that, he changed his smoke from red to blue and slashed a straight line across, and then bisected it directly overhead with another. From the mother ship, far off in orbit, it would be visible telescopically as two smears of red with a smear of blue sandwiched between. But to an observer directly at zenith, it would be a pair of red circles center-crossed in blue. That was the impression Vandro wanted to create-that the observer, with a whole space-fleet, was directly overhead.
The earth had been blackened and burned in patches around the three landing-craft, where the down-thrusting ramjets had scorched a landing-path. The ground under the ships was littered with bits of vegetable-matter and covered with the stubble of the thick, pulpy plants that had recently been harvested from it. Some patches were still burning. Vandro and those with him stomped over to these patches, breathing thanks for their ankle-high boots and leather trousers. They used portable fire extinguishers on the burning places, and then stamped and kicked out any places that looked like they might be still smoldering. Then the crews of the three ships met at the center of the triangle and set down their cases of equipment.
