Collected Short Fiction, page 422
So he had stolen a ship, and was coming back to the Earth that did not want him. He smiled in inner satisfaction. He had been gone from Earth only a little over two months. They hadn’t been able to keep him away.
I showed them, Rocha thought. And now I’m coming home.
The days passed slowly on the stolen ship. There was nothing to see outside but the everlasting nothingness, and in general the ship took care of itself. Rocha assigned men to various posts, and they did their jobs carefully enough: checking the meters and dials, making sure the fuel flow was even, the hydroponics tanks functioning in a well-balanced way, the food being consumed at a regular rate that would leave them enough for the entire journey.
Things were dull. They were gliding through hyperspace toward Earth, toward home. They were men who had little to say to each other, men who lived all their thoughts and words in the confines of their own skulls, brooding over the wrongs that had been done to them.
Every one of them had been radioactively contaminated through an accident unrelated to his pattern of life; it was as if an invisible hand had reached out and cast the fire upon them, making them immediate exiles from civilization. When that is done to a man, when fate destroys all he has for no good reason, it changes the man. Corrodes him. Makes him into something that hates the whole blind unthinking universe about him.
Rocha brooded, and waited for Earth to draw near.
THE first indication they had that Earth was aware of the incident on Sunrise came eleven twenty-four hour periods after they had blasted off. Rocha was in the ship’s large library, scanning bookfilms with weary eyes, when McDermott entered.
“Rocha!”
Tiredly, Rocha looked up. “What is it?”
“They want you down in the signal cabin. Seems Kennedy just picked up a subspace beam from Earth.”
Instantly Rocha came to life; the weariness left him, and he became aroused. “What kind of beam? A message?”
McDermott nodded.
Rocha rose. “Any idea what they want?”
“Kennedy didn’t say. He just said for you to come down to the signal cabin.”
By the time Rocha was out the door, he was half-running. A pulse beat somewhere in his throat. Earth was calling! Earth knew!
In the signalroom, Kennedy looked up at him and nodded hello. Kennedy was a wiry little fellow who had been signalman aboard the spaceship Defiant; there had been a pile explosion aboard that ship nine years earlier, and Kennedy had come out of the holocaust alive—but totally blind, and filled with enough radiation to make him dangerous for the next fifty years.
He was still blind, but he had insisted he could run a spaceship’s communications network, and Rocha had taken him aboard for that purpose. Now he turned his sightless face toward Rocha and said, “There’s been a call from Earth. They know we stole the ship. They want to speak to anybody who’s in charge.”
“Tell them I’m here,” Rocha said. “Open the contact again.”
He watched as Kennedy’s nimble fingers flew over the leads and studs of the communication panel. The blind man seemed to know the precise location of every one of the hundreds of various connections on the control board before him. Rocha realized that for the nine years of sightless exile he had probably been reliving his spacegoing days over and over, until the layout of the communications room was indelibly burned into his mind.
Kennedy said, “I’ve got Ryne Rocha here. He’s in charge of the ship.”
“Put him on.”
Kennedy signalled to Rocha and handed him the microphone. Crisply he said, “Rocha speaking. Who’s this?”
“Earthside talking, Rocha. Commander Lesters of Space Service. I order you to return that ship to Sunrise and restore it to its rightful commander.”
“I don’t take orders from Space Service, Lesters. I’m a civilian.”
“I don’t care who you are! You stole that ship from Captain Joslyn!”
“True.”
“What do you plan to do, Rocha? Ride around hyperspace forever in that ship?”
“No, Commander. I’m going to bring it back and land it on Earth.”
“You’ll never get away with it. We’ll blast you out of the skies with tracer rockets the second you come out of hyperspace. We aren’t going to tolerate brazen criminality of this sort, you can be sure of that. And you’re all subject to the death penalty if you attempt to make a landing on Earth in your radioactive condition.”
“We knew that before we started out,” Rocha said. “If necessary we’ll abandon ship and enter Earth by liferaft. We’ll go where you can’t find us. We just want to be left alone, Lesters—can’t any of you understand that? Can’t you?”
“The law says—”
“The law is blind!”
“Be that as it may,” the Space Service man said. “I’m simply warning you that if your ship becomes visible within striking range from Earth, you’ll be destroyed immediately and without warning. If you choose to return to Sunrise and surrender, we’ll allow you to remain on Sunrise without being troubled.”
“Damned considerate of you, Commander. But we’ll take our chances.” Rocha looked at Kennedy. “Break the contact, signalman. And don’t acknowledge if Earth tries to call us again.”
WHEN he stepped out of the signalroom, McDermott was standing there, looking pale and uneasy.
“I heard that conversation, Rocha. I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“They said they were going to blast us, didn’t they? Maybe we’re better going back to Sunrise like they say. At least—”
“No,” Rocha said. “We’re going to Earth.”
“You ought to put it to a vote.”
Rocha glared bitterly at the smaller man. “We’ve gotten this far. We’re not going to turn back.”
“I still think—”
“All right. I’ll put it to a vote.”
He called a meeting of the thirty renegades and explained the situation to them, reporting exactly what the Earthman had threatened. When he was finished, he called for a vote on going ahead and taking the chance of being detected, or turning back.
The vote was thirty to zero in favor of going ahead. Even McDermott reluctantly raised his hand when he saw he was the only one who objected.
The journey continued without incident for four more days. Now it had reached the halfway point in the trip from Sunrise to Earth, and Rocha began counting the remaining days, and wondering what sort of reception they would get when they arrived on Earth.
He did not consider the fact that they might not arrive on Earth at all. He was expecting no interruptions in the smooth course of the flight through hyperspace, and when the interruption came it came from an utterly unexpected quarter.
Kennedy was the first to know about it. He phoned up to Rocha in the captain’s quarter’s and said, “I’m picking up a funny signal on the subradio set.”
“How funny?” Rocha frowned. “If it’s another message from Earth, I don’t want to hear it. Ignore them.”
“No,” said Kennedy. “It isn’t from Earth. It—it isn’t like any signal I’ve ever heard. I think”—he paused—“I think it’s alien, sir. It’s coming in over a wavelength that isn’t supposed to be functioning, and it’s a code I’ve never heard of.”
“Maybe it’s something new,” Rocha snapped. “I’ll be right there.”
He found Kennedy hunched intently over his communications panel, keying in an amplifier to pick up the signal coming across. Rocha listened. It did sound strange; but then, he knew very little of space communication.
He listened for a while; he snatched up the microphone and said. “Who is this? Come in, please. We get your signal, but no words.”
The strange signal continued. After a long pause Rocha heard faintly: “Do . . . you . . . understand . . . this?”
“Yes! Yes! Who are you!”
“Spaceship Seventeen of Vengilani Fleet. You are—from Earth?”
“We’re Earthmen, yes,” Rocha said. A puzzled frown spread over his face. “Where are you from? How is it you speak our language?”
“We . . . use . . . thought-converter. Delicate mechanism. Do you understand the word surrender?”
Rocha blinked. “Yes. What do you mean?”
“We are invasion fleet. Heading for Earth from Vengilan. We call on you to surrender, Earth ship.”
Rocha realized with sudden shock that he had stumbled over something much bigger than he had been counting on. “Where is Vengilan?” he wanted to know.
“Actual location is military secret. We are not of this galaxy. Will you surrender to us?”
Rocha took a deep breath. “No!”
After having come this far, he had no intention of yielding to alien invaders. He wondered from what dark star they had come, for what purpose they headed toward the unsuspecting Earth. A flicker of loyalty that he had not known existed in him arose. Much as he hated the planet that had expelled him, it was still his planet.
“We will destroy your ship if you do not yield to us,” the alien voice warned, in a toneless monotonous drone. “You have only a short time remaining to permit grappling.”
“Save your time,” Rocha replied. “We’ll fight you but we won’t surrender.”
“Our guns are unstoppable.”
“We’ll take that chance,” he snapped. He turned to Kennedy. “Break that contact, fast!”
The blind signalman ripped out the plug that led from the input-pickup to the amplifier. “It’s broken. Now what do we do?”
Rocha paused. “I want you to send a message to Earth. Beam it as wide as you can, and repeat it until I tell you to stop. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Okay: here it is. Have encountered alien invasion fleet in hyperspace. They request surrender, say they are heading for Earth. Consider yourselves warned Rocha. Repeat it.”
Kennedy repeated the message.
“Good. Start beaming it.”
Fifteen seconds after the message had been beamed for the first time, the alien guns went into action. Rocha’s ship quivered as the first bolt of force slammed into the energy screens.
He grabbed up the all-ship intercom. “Battle stations, all hands. Don spacesuits! We’re under alien attack!”
HE climbed into a spacesuit that hung in an emergency rack just outside the signalroom, while Kennedy continued to beam the warning to Earth. A current of excitement thundered in him. Attack!
A second bolt of force battered the hull of the ship. The vessel had high-megawatt screens designed to protect it from meteor bombardment, but they couldn’t stand up to any prolonged energy assault. War in space was unknown; Earth had never found any enemies. But, of course, this race was from some other galaxy. . . .
The ship had no guns. It was strictly a peaceful passenger vessel. Rocha knew the only hope was that their screens would withstand the enemy assault, but he realized such a hope was an impossible dream. Any moment now the screens would give.
He made his way down to the drive room. There, Curtis was on duty, monitoring the big screens and trying to pour more power into them. Rocha wished they had had at least one skilled screen technician with them, but there were none aboard. Well, they would have to make do.
The ship quivered as yet another enemy shot battered into them. Rocha saw the needle on the screen indicator come perilously close to the overload mark. He knew what would happen when the screens blew. The next alien blast would rip the ship apart, and the crew would go spilling out into space.
“Give it all the power we’ve got,” he shouted over his suit-phones to Curtis.
The big man looked up, glowering. “I’ve channeled everything I could into it. We’ll just have to hang on.”
The aliens were evidently hovering not far from them, cascading beam after beam of heavy-cycle force down on their helpless ship. Probably they were hopelessly off course now; they might have been knocked hundreds of light-years from their path by the power of the assault. Gloomily Rocha saw that even if they survived, they might never find their way safely back to Earth now.
The ship shivered as another sweeping bolt of energy crashed into the hull-screens. Rocha heard the screens groan as they labored to absorb the overload and dissipate it into harmless energy. The needle crept up . . . up . . . up. . . .
. . . into the red band of overload.
The screens died with a whining screech. Rocha looked up at Curtis; the two spacesuited men exchanged glances of desperation. Their mad flight was at an end now. The ship lay bare to assault, and the next furious blast of energy would—
It did.
It ploughed through the now screenless hull like a sword through jelly, cutting and hewing its way and leaving the hull glowing red where destruction’s hand had touched it.
Like peas in a pod the men aboard the ship went spilling out through the split side; those who had not had time to don spacesuits perished immediately, while Rocha and the others in protective garb went hurtling into the grayness of hyperspace knowing that they were as good as dead.
And that’s how it finishes, Rocha thought coldly. We nearly made it. Nearly.
He drifted, hanging with seeming motionlessness in the utterly empty void around him. He could see the split ruin of what had been his ship, not far away; corpses hovered in eternal orbit around it. At least they had a quick death, he thought. Not like us. He saw eight or nine men in spacesuits drifting helplessly nearby. We’ll starve to death. What a lousy way to finish up.
He swung his head back and saw the alien ship orbiting above him—a darkly purple needle, strange in appearance, with symbols in no language Earth had ever seen inscribed on its side.
As he watched, a glowing arm of yellow light sprang out from the alien ship’s side. He frowned, wondering what the beam might be.
Then he felt it around him, seizing him gently as if it were a giant’s hand, and drawing him up and up, toward the ship. He realized now: it was some sort of energy grapple. He was being picked up, possibly for questioning, by the aliens.
He was a prisoner of war. That was not much better than being an exile on Sunrise—but at least he could hope for a quick death.
IT took nearly an hour for the arm to bring him to the alien ship. He noticed that four or five of the others had been caught by the energy grapple too; they clustered about the skin of the ship like hooked fish drawn to a pier.
The hatch opened. The ship swallowed them in, hungrily.
Rocha found himself in an airlock of strange design. A voice said over a loudspeaker, “Remain where you are, Earthmen. Our air is not suitable for you to breathe at present. We will question you.”
A screen lit. Rocha found himself staring at an unutterably alien face. It was fleshy, with drooping bags of skin around the throat; it seemed to be a greenish-yellow in color. Five stubby antennae rose from its high hairless forehead. It had four eyes, placed in a straight line beneath the antennae. They were round, lidless eyes with a baleful, fishy look about them. The alien’s mouth was huge; when it opened, Rocha saw triple rows of tiny fang-like teeth.
The alien spoke into a device that was undoubtedly the thought-converter. The loudspeaker said: “I am Thagran Dyorm, Commander of the Vengilani Invasion Fleet. We are about to make a transition from hyperspace to normal space. When we emerge, we will be in the orbit of the fifth planet surrounding the sun of Earth.”
Rocha’s eyes widened. No wonder these beings had been able to cross the unimaginable gulf between the galaxies! It would have taken his ship at least ten more days to reach the orbit of Jupiter; they were making the hop almost instantaneously. He saw now that his warning to Earth had been futile; against this sort of science, Earth was hopelessly lost.
Part of him tried to pretend that he did not care. But he did care. Earth was his home world.
There was a sudden twisting sensation, and Rocha knew they had emerged into normal space. He wished there were some viewscreen in the airlock where he stood; he wanted to know if the aliens actually had emerged from warp in the orbit of Jupiter, or whether they were creating a hoax to impress him.
The alien commander said, “We intend to launch our attack on Earth at once. If you grant us the information we request, you will be allowed to live on after we have established our dominion over Earth. Otherwise—”
“Don’t tell them anything,” Rocha said to his companions.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Curtis said.
“Or any of us,” added Graham. “Dammit, we should have stayed on Sunrise.”
“Too late for that now,” Rocha said.
Ignoring the intersuit exchange of words, the alien said pompously: “First we desire to know the names and location of the chief Terran cities. Then, the military bases. After that, we will want to know detailed data on the technological strength of Earth. And then—”
The alien paused. In the screen, Rocha saw that another of the same species had come within camera range. He looked highly agitated. He muttered something to the commander which the audio pickups did not register.
When the alien commander swung round to face the captive Earthmen again, his entire expression had changed. The fishy complacency was gone; now his alien features were contorted with unmistakable signs of horror.
“My aides tell me you emanate great quantities of radioactivity. He says you exceed the figures on our detectors.”
“That’s right,” Rocha said. An inspiration struck him. “Every Earthman is radioactive. Didn’t you know that?
We all give off alpha particles. It’s a racial characteristic of ours.”
“The entire race—”
“Of course. Do you want to examine us one by one? Every blessed one of us is radioactive. And so are the men you killed when you blew up our ship. Go back and look, if you like.”
“No, no!” Dismay was evident on the alien face. “An entire world radioactive? Impossible!”
“Examine us and see,” Rocha challenged.
“No. You must be cast from the ship. You will contaminate us.” The alien turned his head and barked orders to invisible aides—orders which the thought-converter translated clearly.
