Collected Short Fiction, page 535
Avery brightened. “It’s worth a try, I suppose. Except that it’s risky business. I hate sending one of my men into an alien camp alone.”
“You won’t have to,” Majeski said. “I volunteer for the job.”
“You?”
“That’s right. Any objections?”
“Plenty. This a job for the Patrol, not for a civilian, Majeski.”
“I’m the head of Cameron Colony. Either let me take the job, or I’ll withdraw my request for Patrol assistance and order you off the planet.”
“But—”
“Well, Avery?”
The Patrol Leader slumped in his seat. “It’s a suicide mission, Majeski, if it really was the alien base and they catch you. But if you’re set on committing hara-kiri, I guess I can oblige. We don’t have time to argue. If you’re bullheadedly going to insist on volunteering, I accept your offer—reluctantly.”
The spaceship hovered forty thousand feet above the surface of the planet. The ejection hatch was open, and a figure clad in a bulky dropsuit stood with his mittened hands grasping the release lever. He waited, while the quiet voice in his headphones counted off numbers for him.
“Ten. . . . nine. . . . eight. . . . seven. . . . six. . . . five. . . . four. . . . three. . . . two. . . . one. . . . jump, Majeski!”
The figure in the dropsuit yanked down on the release lever and the metal arm catapulted him through the ejection hatch. A jet flared behind him—a tiny rocket strapped to his back, designed to force him down through the spaceship’s slipstream. Down and down he tumbled, spiralling through the thin air. Even with the protection of the dropsuit he could sense the bitter cold all about him.
The voice in his headphones never left him. It was the voice of Avery. “Can you hear me, Majeski?”
“I hear you fine.”
“You’ve dropped ten thousand feet. How does your head feel?”
“It’s still attached to my neck.”
“Okay. You’ve dropped fifteen thousand feet. You’re twenty-five thousand feet above the ground. Put your hand on your chute ring.”
“Got it.”
“Good. Count to five and pull.”
Majeski counted out loud. At five, he yanked on the ring and the chute ballooned out. He glanced up over his shoulder after the sudden jolt told him that his free fall had been arrested and he now drifted gently. He could barely see the grayish-blue fabric of the chute above. It was a special low-visibility fabric, chosen to prevent observation from the ground.
It seemed to take forever for him to land, He dropped, finally, into a heavily forested area, coming down between two big trees without fouling his chute. He cut himself loose, climbed out of the cumbersome dropsuit, and took a positional reading. Then he activated the tiny microphone in his chinband and called Avery in the hovering spaceship.
“Landing successful. I’m four miles due west of the Andromedan base. I won’t call you again until I’m there and have looked around. Get your bomb ready just in case this one isn’t a fake.”
“Right.”
“And don’t be itchy on the trigger. Wait till you hear from me.”
“Check, Majeski.”
BREAKING the contact, the Colony Director began to walk. Spring was several weeks old, here in the east, and the trees were ripening into their summer brilliance. This was fertile land out here, he thought. It was a wonderful planet.
Someday they would build their second city here, on the eastern coast—after the aliens were driven off.
He walked at a steady pace, following his compass. He felt no sense of fear, only the nagging dread that perhaps this base, too, might be only an illusion. But he knew strangely that it would not be a mirage. Fate owed that much to him.
After half an hour of constant trek through the forest, he paused and took a new positional reading. He was less than two miles from the supposed location of the alien base. He moved on. Fifteen minutes later, he checked again: three quarters of a mile more. Twelve or thirteen hundred yards, that was all.
His spirits rose as he drew nearer and saw unmistakable signs of activity: trees had been felled, a path had been cleared in the forest. This was it, he thought. The hidden base from which the, attacks on his colony had been projected!
When he was about half a mile away, he could see the alien spaceship—a sleek blue point rising above the trees. Now he proceeded more warily. He was armed with a blaster and with a knife; the latter had been his own idea. Getting closer, Majeski could see the tents as well, three of them.
And—he sucked his breath in sharply—there was one of the aliens!
The Andromedan was coming out of a grove of fruit-trees to the left of the path, laden with a basket of gathered yellow applefruits. No doubt he was providing for the aliens’ meal tonight. Majeski smiled coldly.
The Andromedan was an ugly little creature. He was humanoid, a squat, stocky bowlegged being with glistening green skin, who wore only a brightly woven cloth round his middle. The alien was hairless and slimy-looking. Majeski scurried up behind him, raising his knife.
The Andromedan turned just as Majeski began to lunge. The Colony Director got a good look at the alien’s face—little piggish eyes, a flattened snout, a wide mouth from which prominent yellow incisor teeth projected—and then he drove the keen blade deep into the Andromedan’s belly and twisted upward. The alien dropped his basket of fruit and tumbled soundlessly to the ground. Majeski looked up quickly; no one had observed.
He exulted. One of the aliens was dead! That was for Dave Eames, he thought. A repulsive bluish fluid was gushing in irregular spurts from the alien’s body. Majeski knelt and efficiently slit the creature’s throat, just in case the first slash had not completely killed it. Then he moved on.
There was no doubt, now, that this was the real base. Majeski smiled. The proper thing to do was to make a quick exit, get to a safe distance, and notify Avery that this was the right target. But Majeski had no such notions. He continued toward the three tents.
He turned toward the right and entered the first one, blaster drawn. Three aliens were in it, bent busily over complex machinery. Majeski glanced at the gleaming visionscreens on the wall and saw the images in miniature of hideous monsters. An attack on the colony was under way!
He fired quickly. His first bolt went searing through the body of the nearest Andromedan. That’s for Mike Parker, he thought. He fired again, killing another. For Eleanor Johnson. The third stared at him, piggish little eyes ablaze with fear, and Majeski shot him in the face. For Tom Davis, he said to himself.
He was pleased to see that the images on the screen blanked out the moment he had begun firing. A nauseous stench of burned flesh was rising in the tent. Majeski turned. There were still two tents more.
He entered the second and found four Andromedans at work, servicing some sort of complex power generator. He killed two of them at once; the third leaped wildly at him with a wrench in his hand, while the fourth dashed out of the rear of the tent.
Majeski’s bolt caught the oncoming alien in the throat and hurled him back against a live grid of the generator, where he sizzled briefly and charred to a crisp. But for the first time a hitch had developed. One of his intended victims had gotten away.
The Earthman burst from the tent just in time to see three additional Andromedans come racing toward him from the remaining tent. He ducked as some kind of energy bolt whizzed past his ear; firing, he cut down the closest Andromedan. As he aimed for the second, the remaining alien scored a hit: the energy bolt sang in the air and cut through Majeski’s body like a dart of flame.
Wincing, Majeski put one hand to his stomach and methodically cut down the two surviving aliens before they could fire again. He looked around. All was quiet in the Andromedan camp.
Motion was an effort, but Majeski forced himself to look in the third tent. It was empty. There had only been eight or nine of them, then, and they were all dead.
He activated his microphone and said in a weak voice, “Come in, Avery. . . . come in.”
“Majeski! What’s been going on down there? We haven’t heard from you for so long we thought you were dead.”
“No. . . . not dead yet.”
“What’s been happening?”
“This is. . . . real camp. Andromedans here.”
“For the love of God, get out of there, then—and we’ll bomb them to bits.”
“No—don’t. All dead.”
“Dead?”
“I. . . . killed them,” Majeski said hoarsely. “All of them. But their machines. . . . intact. You come down, take them, study them. Thought projectors. Use their own weapons against them, drive them out of the galaxy. . . .”
“Majeski! Are you all right?”
“Not. . . . exactly.”
“What do you mean?” Avery asked.
“I. . . . wounded. Blaster bolt in the belly. Not. . . .going to last long.”
“Majeski!”
“But. . . . aliens all dead,” the big man said through pain-clenched lips. “Captured their base. And the colony. . . . the colony. . . . is safe. . . . we can rebuild, expand. . . . a second city soon. . . .”
The effort was too much. Majeski clutched his side and toppled forward. Half an hour later, when the spaceship had landed and Avery and his Patrol unit had reached the alien base, they found Majeski sitting upright, dead, with the shattered bodies of Andromedans everywhere about.
But Majeski was smiling. He had saved the colony—and he had done it, not the Patrol. In death, his face gleamed with triumph.
THE END
Collision Course
CHAPTER 1
ONLY a month before, the Technarch McKenzie had calmly sent five men to probable death in the name of Terran progress. But now, it seemed, those five men had not died after all, and McKenzie’s normally rock-hard face now reflected inner tension.
The message, reaching him in the Archonate Center, had been brief. “Luna detection center reports return to this system of the XV-ft1. Landing at Central Australia spaceport requested for 1200 hours EST.”
The Technarch read the message through twice, nodding. So they were back, were they? After a successful trip? By the Hammer, he thought, we’ll see men in the far galaxies yet! And in my Archonate, heaven willing!
His nature was too stern to allow him more than a moment of gloating pride. He had gambled; he had won; and perhaps his name would ring in the galleries of history for millennia. The experimental faster-than-light ship was returning safely.
He depressed a communicator stud. “Set up a transmat connection to Central Australia spaceport right away, Naylor. Immediate departure.”
McKenzie stared for a moment at the big, thick fingers of his hands as they lay before him on the desk. Hands like those could never wire a circuit, wield a surgeon’s excising vibroknife, or tune the fine controls on a thermonuclear generator. But they were hands that could write, “If we remain bound forever to the limiting velocity of light, we will be as snails seeking to cross a continent. We must not be lulled into complacency by the slow expansion of our colonial empire. We must surge ever outward; and the faster-than-light spacedrive must be the be-all and end-all of our research effort.”
He had written those words fifteen years earlier, in 2765, and delivered them as his first public address after his accession to the Archonate.
And, fifteen years later, a ship had gone to the stars and returned in less than a month.
Rising, McKenzie traversed the gleaming marble floor of his private chamber and passed through the irising sphincter into his transmat cubicle.
Naylor waited there, an obsequious little man in the stiff black robe of the Technarch’s personal staff. “The coordinates are set, Excellency.”
McKenzie stepped forward. The lambent green transmat field pulsed up from the floor aperture, forming a curtain dividing the cubicle in two. The hidden power generators of the transmat were linked directly to the main generator that spun endlessly on its poles somewhere beneath the Atlantic.
There was no sensation. The Technarch McKenzie was destroyed, a stream of tagged wavicles was hurled halfway across a world, and the Technarch McKenzie was reconstituted. If the moment of destruction had been longer, the pain would have been unbearable. But the transmat field ripped the Technarch’s body molecule from molecule in so tiny a fragment of a microsecond that his neural system could not possibly have relayed the pain; and the restoration to life came with equal speed. Whole and undamaged, McKenzie stepped through the field and out, almost instantly later, in the transmat cubicle at Central Australia spaceport.
It had been shortly before noon in New York. Here, it was early the following morning. A wallclock read 0213 hours. McKenzie left the transmat cubicle.
They spotted him at once; the Technarch’s toweringly commanding figure was a familiar sight here, and they came running to greet him. McKenzie smiled a Technarch’s greeting at Daviot and Leeson, who had developed the warp-drive that powered the experimental ship; at Herbig, the spaceport commandant; at Jesperson, the coordinator of faster-than-light research.
McKenzie said, “What’s the news from the ship?”
Jesperson grinned boyishly. “They sent the all-okay signal five minutes ago. They’re in a deceleration orbit, coming down on rocket drive, and they’ll make touchdown at 0233 hours.”
“How about their trip?”
Leeson said in his rumbling basso, “It seems they made it out and back.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Daviot objected.
McKenzie scowled. “Make up your minds.”
Daviot said, “All we know is that they quote switched from warp-drive to plasma-drive some time last evening near the orbit of Jupiter, unquote.”
The Technarch looked up and out. The clear desert air, utterly transparent, yielded a magnificent view of the heavens. Stars speckled the black sky like jewels.
In twenty minutes—nineteen—eighteen—the XV-ft1 would be returning.
He looked at the stars. Hundreds, thousands of them. Every star within a radius of four hundred light-years that bore a habitable planet—and that was most of them—had been reached by humanity. For centuries now, ships traveling at nine-tenths of the speed of light had coursed outward to the stars, prisoned by the limiting velocity but still capable of eating up the parsecs, given enough time. It had taken six years to make the first oneway trip to the Centauri system. The return, via transmat, was all but instantaneous.
But you had to reach the stars before you could plant the transmat pickup there, and that was the stumbling-block. Ever outward, by little hops, the empire of Man expanded. But always hampered by the inexorable mathematical limits of the known universe. Once a planet could be reached and linked into the interstellar transmat network, it was as close to Earth as any other point within the network. The transmat gave infinite connectivity—once the link had been established. But until then—
So progress had been slow. After better than four centuries of interstellar travel, mankind had colonized every habitable world within a sphere of four hundred tight-years’ radius. And no other intelligent life-form had ever been discovered. The universe belonged to man—but it would be millennia before man could take possession.
That fact had irked McKenzie during his years of training for the Archonate, and when the death of Technarch Bengstrom raised McKenzie to the dais he bent all of Earth’s energies to the task of cheating the chains of relativity.
There were failures, expensive ones. Test ships had been sent out and monitored and followed by manned ships, and the manned ships had exploded or never returned. And still there were volunteers for the next ship, and the next, and the one after that.
Until the Daviot-Leeson Drive, with its incredibly slender generator smashing a hole in space-time by controlled thermo-nuclear thrusts—and suddenly the way seemed clear. Space in the region of a star, reasoned Daviot and Leeson, is warped and distorted by the star’s mass and heat. If only the same effect could be duplicated in miniature, if only a wedge could be opened in the spacetime fabric wide enough for a ship to slip through, travel a predetermined course, and return—then man’s dominion would be boundless.
It took six years from the first pilot models to the confidence that allowed McKenzie to send a manned ship to the stars. And now that ship was returning. In thirteen minutes, twelve, eleven. Jesperson, wearing head-phones, was in contact with the main monitoring station at the far end of the field.
At five minutes before touchdown time Jesperson said, “They’ve sighted it clear and sharp.”
McKenzie moistened his lips, turning away so the others would not see a hint of tension on the Technarch’s face. Four minutes. Three. Two.
Jesperson was relaying the final countdown. And then the XV-ft1 was there, arching down in a golden stream of flame, coming to rest in front of them, lowering its landing-jacks and stabilizers. The decontamination crew was swabbing down the field; the hatch was opening. Men came forth.
Technarch McKenzie counted them. One, two, three, four, five. No casualties, then.
The Technarch said to Jesperson, “Have the men brought up here right away.”
“Hearkening, Excellency.” Jesperson gabbled into a phone. Moments later, the door irised open and the crew of the XV-ft1 entered.
They looked tired, sallowfaced, sweaty. The beards belonged to Laurance, Peterszoon, and Clive. Nakamura’s face was clean-shaven, but his black hair hung dankly over his ears. Only Hernandez looked completely well-groomed. But all five men had the same weary, overstrung look.
McKenzie walked briskly toward them. His big hand seized Laurance’s limp, moist one.
“Welcome back, Commander. All of you, welcome.”
“Obedience, Excellency. It’s—good to be back.”
