Collected Short Fiction, page 660
“I don’t find your coyness very appealing,” Muller said bluntly. “A full-scale council decision was taken after close to a year of debate, and it was voted to leave the Hydrans alone for at least a century unless they showed some sign of going into space. Who reversed that decision, and why, and when?”
Boardman smiled his crafty smile. “I didn’t mean to seem deceptive, Dick. The decision was reversed by a council session eight months ago, while you were out Rigel way.”
“And the reason?”
One of the extragalactic probes came back with convincing evidence that there’s at least one highly intelligent and quite superior species in one of our neighboring clusters.”
“Where?”
“It doesn’t matter, Dick. Pardon me, but I won’t tell you at this time. Let’s just say that from what we know of them now, they’re much more than we can handle. They’ve got a galactive drive, and we can reasonably expect them to come visiting us one of these centuries, and when they do we’ll have a problem. So it’s been voted to open contact with Beta Hydri IV ahead of schedule, by way of having some insurance against that day.”
“You mean“” Muller said, “that we want to make sure we’re on good terms with the other race of our own galaxy before the extragalactics show up?”
“Exactly.”
“I’ll take that drink now,” said Muller.
Boardman gestured. Muller tapped out a potent combination on the console; downed it quickly, ordered another. Suddenly he had a great deal to digest.
VII
For a couple of centuries man had explored the stars without finding a trace of a rival. There were plenty of planets, and many of them were potentially habitable, and a surprising number were Earthlike to four or five places. That much had been expected; the sky is full of main-sequence suns, with a good-many of the F-type and G-type stars most likely to support life. The process of planetogenesis is nothing remarkable, and most of those suns had complements of five to a dozen worlds, some of them were of the right size and mass and density slots to permit the retention of atmosphere and the convenient evolution of life, and a number of those worlds were situated within the orbital zone where they were best able to avoid extremes of temperature. So life abounded, and the galaxy was a zoologist’s delight.
But in his helter-skelter expansion out of his own system, man had found only the traces of former intelligent species. The most spectacular ancient site was the maze of Lemnos; but other worlds too had their Stumps of cities, their weathered foundations, their burial grounds and strewn potsherds. Space became an archeologist’s delight, too. The collectors of alien animals and the collectors of alien relics were kept busy. Whole new scientific specialties burst into being. Societies that had vanished before the Pyramids had been conceived now underwent reconstruction.
A curious blight of extinction had come upon all of the galaxy’s other intelligent races, though. Evidently they had flourished so long ago that not even their decadent children survived: they were one with Nineveh and Tyre, blotted out, cut off. Careful scrutiny showed that the youngest of the dozen or so known extrasolar intelligent cultures had perished eighty thousand years earlier.
The galaxy is wide, and man kept on looking, drawn to find his stellar companions by some perverse mixture of curiosity and dread. Though the warp drive provided speedy transport to all points within the universe, neither available personnel nor available ships could cope with the immensity of the surveying tasks. Several centuries after his intrusion into the galaxy, man was still making discoveries, some of them quite close to home. The star Beta Hydri had seven planets; and on the fourth was another sapient species.
There were no landings. The possibility of such a discovery had been examined well in advance, and plans had been drawn to avoid a blundering trespass of unpredictable consequences. The survey of Beta Hydri IV had been carried out from beyond its cloud layer. Cunning devices had measured the activity behind that tantalizing gray mask. Hydran energy production was known to a tolerance of a few million kilowatts; Hydran urban districts had been mapped and their population density estimated; the level of Hydran industrial development had been calculated by a study of thermal radiations. There was an aggressive, growing, potent civilization down there, probably comparable in technical level to late twentieth-century Earth. There was only one significant difference: the Hydrans had not begun to enter space. That was the fault of the cloud layer. A race that never has seen the stars is not likely to show much desire to reach them.
Muller had been privy to the frantic conferences that followed the discovery of the Hydrans. He knew the reasons why they had been placed under quarantine, and he realized that only much more urgent reasons had resulted in the lifting of that quarantine. Unsure of its ability to handle a relationship with non-human beings, Earth had wisely chosen to keep away from the Hydrans for a while longer; but now all that was changed.
“What happens now?” Muller asked. “An expedition?”
“Yes.”
“How soon?”
“Within the next year, I’d say.” Muller tensed. “Under whose leadership?”
“Perhaps yours, Dick.
“Why perhaps?”
“You might not want it?”
“When I was eighteen,” Muller said, “I was with a girl Out in the woods on Earth, in the California forest preserve, and I told her that I was going to discover things out in space, that men were going to remember me the way they remember Columbus and Magellan and the early astronauts and all. And that was the night I grew my ambitions.” He laughed. “There are things we can say at eighteen, but not again.”
“There are things we can do at eighteen that we can’t do again either,” said Boardman. “Well, Dick? You’re past fifty now, right? You’ve walked in the stars. Do you feel like a god?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you want to go to Beta Hydri IV?”
“You know I do?”
“Alone?”
Muller felt the ground give way before him, and abruptly it seemed to him that he was taking his first spacewalk again, falling freely toward all the universe. “Alone?”
“We’ve programmed the whole thing and concluded that to send a bunch of men down there at this point would be a mistake. The Hydrans haven’t responded very well to our eye probes. You saw that they picked the eye up and smashed it. We can’t begin to fathom their psychologies, because we’ve never been up against alien minds before. But we feel that the safest thing, both in terms of potential manpower loss and in terms of impact on their society, is to send a single ambassador down there to them, one man, coming in peace, a shrewd, strong man who has been tested under a variety of stress situations and who will develop ways of initiating contact. That man may find himself chopped to shreds thirty seconds after making contact. On the other hand, if he survives he’ll have accomplished something utterly unique in human history. It’s your option.”
It was irresistible. Mankind’s ambassador to the Hydrans! To go atone, to walk alien soil and extend humanity’s first greeting to cosmic neighbors—
It was his ticket to immortality. It would write his name forever on the stars.
“How do you figure the chances of survival?” Muller asked.
“The computation is one chance in sixty-five of coming out whole, Dick. Considering that it’s not an Earth-type planet to any great degree, so you’ll need a life-support system, and you may get a chilly reception. One in sixty-five.”
“Not too bad.”
“I’d never accept such odds myself,” Boardman said, grinning.
“No, but I might.” He drained his glass. To carry it off meant imperishable fame. To fail, to be slain by the Hydrans, even that was not so dreadful. He had lived well. There were worse fates than to die bearing mankind’s banner to a strange world. That throbbing pride of his, that hunger for glory, that childlike craving for renown that he had never outgrown, drove him to it.
Marta reappeared. She was wet from her swim, her nude body glossy, her hair plastered to the slender column of her neck. She might have been a leggy fourteen-year-old, Muller thought, looking at her narrow hips, her lean thighs. Boardman tossed her a drier. She thumbed it and stepped into its yellow field, making one complete turn. She took her garment from the rack and covered herself unhurriedly. “That was great,” she said. Her eyes met Muller’s for the first time since her return. “Dick, what’s the matter with you? You look wide open—stunned. Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“What happened?”
“Mr. Boardman’s made a proposition.”
“You can tell her about it, Dick. We don’t plan to keep it a secret. There’ll be a galaxy-wide announcement right away.”
“There’s going to be a landing on Beta Hydri IV,” Muller said in a thick voice. “One man. Me. How will it work, Charles? A ship in a parking orbit, and then I go down in a powered drop-capsule equipped for return?”
“Yes.”
Marta said, “It’s insane, Dick, don’t do it.”
“It’s a quick death if things don’t work out, Marta. I’ve taken worse risks before.”
“No. Look, sometimes I think I’ve got a little precog. I see things ahead, Dick.” She laughed nervously, her pose of cool sophistication abruptly shattering. “If you go there, I don’t think you’ll live, either. Say you won’t go. Say it, Dick!”
“You’ve never officially accepted the proposition,” Boardman said.
“I know,” Muller said. He got to his feet, nearly reaching the low roof of the dining capsule, and walked toward Marta and put his arms around her. He held her firmly. She looked at him in horror. He kissed the tip of her nose and the lobe of her left ear. She shrank away from him, stumbled, nearly plunged into Boardman’s lap. Boardman caught her and held her. Muller said, “You know what the answer has to be.”
That afternoon one of the robot probes reached Zone F. They still had a distance to go; but it would not be long, Muller knew, before they were at the heart of the maze.
VIII
“There he is,” Rawlins said. “At last!”
Via the drone probe’s eyes he stared at the man in the maze. Muller leaned casually against a wall, arms folded, a big weather-beaten man with a harsh chin and a massive wedge-shaped nose. He did not seem at all alarmed by the presence of the drone.
Rawlins cut in the audio pickup and heard Muller say, “Hello, robot. Why are you bothering me?”
The probe, of course, did not reply. Neither did Rawlins, who could have piped a message to him through the drone. He stood by the data terminal, crouching a little for a better view. His weary eyes throbbed. It had taken them nine local-time days to get one of their probes all the way through the maze to the center. The effort had cost them close to a hundred probes; each inward extension of the safe route by twenty meters or so had required the expenditure of one of the robots. Still, that wasn’t so bad, considering that the number of wrong choices in the maze was close to infinite. Through luck, the inspired use of the ship’s brain and a study battery of sensory devices, they had managed to avoid all of the obvious traps and most of the cleverer ones. And now they were in the center. Rawlins had been up all night, monitoring this critical phase, the penetration of Zone A. Hosteen had gone to sleep. So, finally, had Boardman. A few of the crewmen were still on duty, here and aboard the ship, but Rawlins was the only member of the civilian complement still awake.
He wondered if the discovery of Muller had been supposed to take place during his stint. Probably not. Boardman wouldn’t want to risk blowing things by letting a novice handle the big moment. Well, too bad; they had left him on duty, and he had moved his probe a few meters inward, and now he was looking right at Muller.
Muller looked sad around the eyes, and his lips were compressed in a taut, tense line. Rawlins had been expecting something more dramatic, something romantic, some mirror of agony on that face. Instead he saw only the craggy, indifferent, almost insensitive-looking features of a tough, durable man in late middle age. Muller had gone gray, and his clothing was a little ragged; he looked worn and frayed himself. But that was only to be expected of a man who had been living this kind of exile for nine years.
“What do you want?” Muller asked the probe. “Who sent you? Why don’t you go away?”
Rawlins did not dare to answer at this point. Brusquely he keyed the probe to freeze while he sped away toward the dome where Boardman slept.
Boardman was sleeping under a canopy of life-sustaining devices.
He was, after all, at least eighty years old, though he certainly didn’t look it, and one way to keep from looking it was to plug one’s self into one’s sustainers every night. Strapped to Boardman’s forehead were a couple of meningeal electrodes that guaranteed a proper and healthy progression through the levels of sleep, thus washing the mind of the day’s fatigue poisons. An ultrasonic drawcock filtered dregs and debris from Boardman’s arteries. Hormone flow was regulated by the ornate webwork hovering above his chest. The whole business was linked to and directed by the ship’s brain. Within the elaborate life system Boardman looked unreal and waxy. His breathing was slow and regular; his soft lips were slack; his cheeks seemed puffy and loose-fleshed. Boardman’s eyeballs were moving rapidly beneath the lids, a sign of dreaming, of upper sleep. Could he be awakened safely now?
Rawlins feared to risk it. Not directly, anyway. He ducked out of the room and activated the terminal just outside. “Take a dream to Charles Boardman,” Rawlins said. “Tell him we found Muller. Tell him he’s got to wake up right away. Say, Charles, Charles, wake up, we need you. Got it?”
“Acknowledged,” said the ship’s brain.
The impulse leaped from dome to ship, was translated into response-directed form, and returned to the dome. Rawlins’s message seeped into Boardman’s mind through the electrodes on his forehead. Rawlins entered the old man’s sleeproom again.
Boardman stirred. His hands formed claws and scraped gently at the machinery in whose embrace he lay.
“Muller—” he muttered.
His eyes opened. For a moment he did not see. But the waking process had begun, and the life system jolted his metabolism sufficiently to get him functioning again. “Ned?” he said hoarsely. “What are you doing here? I dreamed that—”
“It wasn’t a dream, Charles. I programmed it for you. We got through to Zone A. We found Muller.”
Boardman undid his system and sat up instantly, alert, aware. “What time is it?”
“Dawn’s just breaking.”
“And how long ago did you find him?”
“Perhaps fifteen minutes. I froze the probe and came right to you. But I didn’t want to rush you awake, so—”
“All right. All right.” Boardman had swung out of bed, now. He staggered a little as he got to his feet. He wasn’t yet at his daytime vigor, Rawlins realized; his real age was showing. He found an excuse to look away, studying the life system to avoid having to see the meaty folds of Boardman’s body.
“Let’s go,” Boardman said. “Unfreeze that probe. I want to see him right away.”
Using the terminal in the hall, Rawlins brought the probe back to life. The screen showed them Zone A of the maze, cozier-looking than the outer reaches. Muller was not in view.
“Must have walked out of sight range,” Rawlins said. He moved the probe in a standing circle, taking in a broad sweep of low cubical houses, high-rising archways, and tiered walls. A small catlike animal scampered by, but there was no sign of Muller.
“He was right over there,” Rawlins insisted unhappily. “He—”
“All right He didn’t have to stay in one place while you were waking me up. Walk the probe around.” Rawlins activated the drone and started it in a slow cruising exploration of the street. Muller abruptly stepped out of a windowless building and planted himself in front of the probe.
“Again,” he said. “Back to life, are you? Why don’t you speak up? What’s your ship? Who sent you?”
“Should we answer?” Rawlins asked.
“No.”
Boardman’s face was pressed almost against the screen. He pushed Rawlins’s hands from the controls and went to work on the fine tuning himself, until Muller was sharply in focus. Boardman kept the probe moving, sliding around in front of Muller, as though trying to hold the man’s attention and prevent him from wandering off again.
In a low voice Boardman said, “That’s frightening. The look on his face—”
“I thought he looked pretty calm.”
“What do you know? I remember that man. Ned, that’s a face out of hell. His cheekbones are twice as sharp as they used to be. His eyes are awful. You see the way his mouth turns down, on the left side? He might even have had a light stroke. But he’s lasted well enough, I suppose.”
Muller, keeping pace with the drone, said in a deep, gruff voice, “You’ve got thirty seconds to state your purpose here. Then you’d better turn around, and get going back the way you came.”
“Won’t you talk to him?” Rawlins asked. “He’ll wreck the probe.”
“Let him,” said Boardman. “The first person who talks to him is going to be flesh and blood, and he’s going to be standing face to face with him. That’s the only way it can be. This has to be a courtship, Ned. We can’t go through the speakers of a probe.”
“Ten seconds,” said Muller.
He reached into his pocket and came out with a glossy black metal globe the size of an apple, with a small square window on one side. Rawlins had never seen anything like it before. Perhaps it was some alien weapon Mueller had found in this city. Swiftly Muller raised the globe and aimed the window at the face of the drone probe.
The screen went dark.
“Looks like we’ve lost another probe,” Rawlins said.
Boardman nodded. “Yes. The last probe we’re going to lose. Now we start losing men.”
