Collision Course Read online

  “Hey!” Dominici exclaimed. “Food!”

  Bernard turned. He caught a glimpse of a dying light, and, spread out on the grass in front of the house, he saw trays of food. Hunger assailed him, and he realized they were far from the ship, far from their own Earthman foods, with no immediate likelihood of returning.

  “We might as well dig in,” he said. “The worst it can do is kill us.”

  He picked up a small golden cake and nibbled it experimentally. It literally melted in his mouth, flowing down his gullet like honey. He ate another, then turned his attention to blue gourd-like vegetables, to a crystal pitcher of clear yellow wine, to round translucent white fruits the size of cherries. It was all delicious, and it was impossible to suggest that such delicate foods might be poisonous to a Terran metabolism. He ate his fill and wandered away, stretching out on the grass.

  The sun was dropping in the heavens now. Near the horizon a small moon could be seen, low in the late-afternoon sky, visible as a tiny flat pearl against the darkening blue. It was a scene of simple beauty, as the meal had been simple, as the few Rosgollan buildings he had seen were simple. That simplicity alone argued for the great antiquity of these people. They had gone past the cultural stage of finding virtue in size and complexity, into the serene mature era of clean lines and uncluttered horizones. Bernard wondered how numerous they were. If they lived scattered as sparsely as the view indicated, there could not be many of them on this world—but perhaps there were thousands of Rosgollan worlds strung like beads through space, each with its few thousand inhabitants.

  He could find pleasure in such a life, he who had enjoyed solitude and quiet, the peace of a fishing preserve on a young colony, the privacy of his own flat in London, the silence of his study-retreat in the Syrtis Major.

  “What do they want with us?” Hernandez was asking.

  “We amuse them,” Laurance said. “Maybe they’ll grow tired of us sooner or later, and let us go.”

  “Let us go where?” Nakamura said quizzically. “We are more than one hundred thousand light-years from home. Or will the Rosgollans show us how to find our way back, when they let us go?”

  “If they let us go,” Dominici corrected.

  “They won’t keep us here long,” Bernard said, breaking his long silence.

  “Oh? How do you know?”

  “Because we don’t fit into the scheme of things here,” the sociologist replied. “We’re blotches on the landscape. The Rosgollans have their own tranquil lives to lead. Why should they install a bunch of barbarians on their quiet planet to stir things up? No, they’ll let us go when they’re through with us. I hardly think that these people are the zookeeper type.”

  The night was falling rapidly now. It was an old world, Bernard thought; an old race, an old sun, short days and long nights.

  Unfamiliar stars began to poke through the twilight’s gray haze. Later, when the sharp darkness had replaced the vague twilight, it would be possible to see the island universe in which Earth’s sun was merely an indistinguishable dot of light.

  Darkness came on with a rush. The Earthmen once again entered the little building provided for them; a warm glow of light made it more cheery, and it seemed proof against the chill growing outside.

  “What do we do?” Dominici asked, of nobody in particular. “Sack out and wait for morning?”

  “Is there anything else we can do?” Havig demanded. “We have no very great choice of diversions. We can sleep, and we can pray, and we can think.”

  “Pray for us, Havig,” said Laurance quietly. “Talk to that God of yours, get Him to arrange for our return trip home.”

  Bernard said, “I don’t think he can do that, Commander. Don’t Neopuritans believe that it’s irreverent to ask for special favors?”

  Havig flashed one of his rare smiles. “You are both right and you are wrong, friend Bernard. We feel it an impertinence to approach Him for worldly goods, for luxuries, for power. This is not prayer; prayer is communication, understanding, love. Not begging. But, on the other hand, to pray for our welfare, our salvation—this is hardly irreverent. He wants us to ask for whatever we think we need, but then to leave it up to Him and trust that when His will is done, all will be well.”

  “But that’s begging, isn’t it?” Bernard objected.

  Havig shrugged. “In His eyes, we are all supplicants in great need. I will gladly pray for all of us, as I have been doing from the first.”

  “Right, pray for us,” Laurance said gruffly. “We need all the help we can get.”

  Some of the men settled themselves on the cushions as if settling down for the night. Bernard walked to the edge of the single room, leaned against the wall, and watched it turn transparent for three feet on either side of him to provide him with a window.

  He peered outward, upward. The strange stars blazed down. He sought for Earth’s galaxy, but it did not seem to be visible from this part of the planet. Feeling suddenly stifled by the magnitude of his distance from home, Bernard reeled away from the window and threw himself down on the nearest cushion. He jammed his eyes tightly together. His lips moved as if of their own accord.

  He recovered his self-control after an instant and thought in quiet wonder, I prayed! By the Hammer, I actually prayed to go home!

  The prayer had been like a release. The knot of tension that had been forming for hours within him let go its hold. He cradled his head on his folded arms, kicked off his shoes, and was asleep within seconds.

  FOURTEEN

  Morning came swiftly. Bernard woke feeling cramped and musty from having slept fully dressed, and rose to a sitting position. The others were strewn around the floor, still asleep, and the room was still dark. But he was awake. He tiptoed to the wall, touched it to make it transparent, and saw that the sun had risen. He glanced at his watch. It was only little more than nine hours since the night had fallen, and here the sun had risen again. Which meant that the day, here on this world Rosgolla, was only about eighteen or nineteen hours long.

  Stepping through the conveniently opening door, Bernard sucked in his breath sharply and felt a quick stab of awe and delight. The air was marvelously fresh and sweet, like young wine. The distant hills, smooth rounded humps, looked new-minted in the transparent morning sky. A silvery sheen of dew glistened over the meadow.

  For an instant Bernard almost forgot where he was and how he had come to be here.

  He had dreamed of Katha. Now, in wakefulness, the lingering memory of the dream surprised him, and made his mood a sadly introspective one. He rarely thought, never dreamed, of the slim, bright-eyed, copper-haired girl who had been his second wife. Yet last night he had dreamed of Katha.

  He thought he knew the reason why, too. The Rosgollan interrogation had stirred up the old memories, and the long-hidden patterns would return to trouble him in dreams until once again they settled, like particles suspended in water, to their depth. He would suffer meanwhile. He had thought he had come to an accomodation with himself on the subject of Katha, but the dream had disturbed him in a way he had thought was far behind.

  “Morning,” a voice said, behind him, startling him out of his reverie.

  Bernard turned. “Morning,” he said to Dominici. “You surprised me.”

  “Been up long?”

  “Only a little while, Dom. Ten minutes, maybe. I just walked out to have a look-see.” Bernard’s eyebrows scooped into a frown; Dominici’s sudden blurt of sound had shattered the dream for good.

  “You sleep well?” Dominici wanted to know.

  “Middling.” Bernard knelt and ran his hand over the cool dewy grass. “I was bothered by dreams.”

  “Dreams? That’s funny. So was I.” Dominici laughed quietly. “I dreamed I was honeymooning again. Took me back fifteen, eighteen years. The two of us in a watercar, skimming over the waves. My arm around her waist. Her hair billowing out in the breeze. And casting a line, pulling a big thing with teeth out, Jan afraid of it and asking me to throw it back, i
nto the water…” Dominici paused. “I used to wake up drenched with sweat when I dreamed about Jan. Not now, though. I suppose I’m starting to forget. She was killed in a transmat discontinuity,” he added after a brief pause.

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Bernard flinched at the image of a young woman smiling goodbye, stepping into the radiant transmat field, then vanishing forever into the void in a one-in-a-trillion accident. The transmat was not perfect; yet this was the first time Bernard had ever spoken to someone directly involved in any sort of transmat accident.

  “If you have to die,” Dominici said, “I suppose that’s the best way of any. You don’t feel a thing, not even for a quarter of a second. One minute you’re alive, the next you don’t exist. I didn’t have a funeral for her. I kept hoping she’d turn up, you know. There was always that element of doubt. But the transmat people said no, there definitely had been a slipup in the coordinates, she was gone forever. They gave me two hundred thousand in damages. And you know something? When I held that check in my hands I broke down and cried for the first time since it had happened. Because then I believed it.”

  “What a terrible thing to happen,” Bernard muttered.

  “We were going on vacation,” Dominici said quietly. “Everything was packed, I was standing there with the suitcases in my hands. She kissed me, stepped through…”

  “Don’t go on. You’re hurting yourself.”

  “I don’t mind,” Dominici said. “Some of the pain is dying down now. After ten years. Look, I’m not shaking. I’m talking about her, and I’m not shaking. That’s a step. I’m just slow to get over it, that’s all.”

  They talked on for a while, as the others of the group began one by one to awaken within. It occurred to Bernard that he liked Dominici more than any of his other fellow wayfarers; Havig, though not the stereotyped fanatic Bernard had originally pictured him as, was far too austere and unbending to make a close friend, while Stone, for all his superficial diplomatic guile, was much too open and simple a person. But Dominici had an agreeable complexity, this vitriolic little man who blasphemed irreverently at Havig and yet, in times of genuine stress, bowed himself to utter a Latin prayer and make the sign of the Cross.

  One at a time, now, the others were coming out, stretching their legs after the short night. Stone joined them first, then Nakamura with his cheery greeting, then Havig, nodding brusquely in that neither-friendly-nor-hostile way of his, and then Laurance, lost in his own private bitterness. After him came Clive and Hernandez, with the taciturn Peterszoon strolling out last and glaring at the group in general as though each one, personally, bore the direct responsibility for his current predicament.

  “What are we supposed to be doing?” Clive asked. “We just stand here and wait, eh?”

  “Maybe they’ll feed us,” Stone said. “I’m starved. Is there any sign of breakfast?”

  “Not yet,” answered Bernard. “Maybe they were just waiting until we were all awake.”

  “Or maybe they won’t feed us at all,” Dominici suggested. “We’re just a pack of filthy lower beings, after all. And if they decide…”

  “Look there!” Hernandez sang out suddenly. “I’ll be damned! Look!”

  Every head turned as one to look in the direction of Hernandez’ tautly pointing arm.

  “No,” Bernard gasped in flat disbelief. “It just isn’t so. It’s a hoax—an illusion…”

  For an instant, a nimbus of radiance had settled lightly to the meadow some fifty yards from the group of Earthmen, having drifted down from far above. The light had glimmered briefly, then flickered out.

  And in the glowing afterimage of the light, two burly figures could be seen—two massive dark-skinned figures, not precisely human, that staggered uncertainly over the moist grass, looking about them in bewilderment and—perhaps— fear.

  Skrinri and Vortakel.

  The kharvish.

  The haughty Norglan diplomats.

  “We have brought you companions,” said a Rosgollan voice of invisible source. “The negotiations may now proceed once more.”

  The big Norglans looked as though they were drunk, or else just badly disorientated. They came to a halt, though, seemingly collecting their wits, and made a swift recovery from their attack of the blind staggers. Then all their recovery went for nought as they recoiled in astonishment upon catching sight of the Earthmen.

  “Are they the same ones as—as we talked to before?” Dominici asked.

  “I’m sure of it,” Bernard said. “Take a look. See, the bigger one is Skrinri, the one with the scar on his shoulder is Vortakel.”

  It was so hard to tell alien beings one from another, Bernard thought. Their very alienness served to draw the attention away from any minor differences of appearance that would aid in distinguishing them. But unmistakably these were the two Norglans who had come as kharvish to the Earthmen.

  The Norglans drew near, seemingly making an attempt to master their total bewilderment. In a tone that was harsh, guttural, quite unlike his mellow and confident boom of old, Skrinri said, “You—Earthmen? The same Earthmen?”

  Stone was supposed to be the spokesman of the Terran group. But Stone was gaping in dumbstruck wonderment. After an instant of cold silence Bernard called out, “Yes. We have met before with you. You are Skrinri—and you, you are Vortakel.”

  “We are.” It was Skrinri who still answered. “But—why have you come here…?”

  “We were taken here, not of our own will.” Bernard illustrated the process by graphically snatching up a blade of grass. “Our ship was captured and taken here. But what of you?”

  Skrinri, apparently still overwhelmed by the enormity of what had been done to him, did not reply. It was Vortakel who spoke, in an unsteady voice. “There was—there was light all around. And a voice said, Come, and the world was not there any more. And—and we are now here…” He stopped, as though abashed at his admission of the ease with which they had been yanked across the universe.

  It was discomforting, and yet in a way strangely satisfying and pleasant, to see how completely shaken the two Norglan emissaries were. Not surprisingly, Skrinri and Vortakel seemed thoroughly demolished by the abrupt discovery that they did not represent the pinnacle of evolution in the universe after all.

  “Where are we?” Skrinri asked.

  “Far from home,” Bernard said. He groped for the words he wanted; how was it possible to explain in communicable terms the concepts “galaxy,” “parsec,” “universe”? He abandoned the effort. “We are—so far from home,” he said after a moment’s thought, “that neither your sun nor ours can be seen in the sky.”

  The Norglans looked at each other in a way that seemed to connote simultaneous suspicion and distress. The two aliens spoke with each other for a long while, in their own consonant-studded, vastly involuted language. The Earthmen stood by, listening without comprehension, as Skrinri and Vortakel discussed the situation.

  Bernard pitied them. If anything, the Norglans had a higher opinion of themselves and their relation to the universe at large than any of the Earthmen had; and it had been crushing enough to the Terran ego to discover that such a race as the Rosgollans existed. How much more agonizing it must be, he wondered, for the Norglans to discover that they could be plucked from their planet and hurled incalculable distances across the sky by strange glowing beings of another galaxy?

  He became aware that Rosgollans were returning. Like fireflies they glimmered on the horizon, flickering into existence all about. Two, three, fifty, a hundred: soon the meadow was ringed with the radiant creatures, will-o’-the-wisps floating above the dew-flecked ground.

  A silent Rosgollan voice said, “We have interrogated the Norglans while they journeyed here. We learn from them that they hold it is their manifest destiny to conquer all the universe, while you Earthmen have something of the same belief. Obviously, one side or the other must give ground or there can be no peace between you, and war will sunder your planets.”

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p; Skrinri growled—evidently the Rosgollan’s words had been intelligible to the Norglans as well as the Earthmen— “We have been fair to the Terrans. We permit them to keep their own worlds. But the other planets—these must be ours.”

  “By whose grant?” asked the Rosgollan with a trace of mockery in the bland voice. “At whose behest do you take possession of all the worlds there are?”

  “At our own!” rumbled the Norglan, getting some of his self-confidence back. “The worlds are there; we reach them; we take them. What greater authority do we need than our own strength?”

  “None,” replied the Rosgollan. “But your own strength is insufficient. Weak, arrogant, blustering creatures you are, nothing more. I speak now to both participants in this dispute.”

  Skrinri and Vortakel seemed to curdle with rage. “We do not speak more! Return us to our world or we shall take steps! Imperial Norgla does not tolerate this manner of abuse. We…”

  Vortakel’s voice died away in sudden confusion. He and Skrinri had risen from the ground during their outburst; now they hovered, better than a yard above the grasstops, kicking their feet in rage and frustration. Involuntarily, several of the Earthmen laughed—but the laughter died away, quickly, guiltily. Bernard felt a twinge of shame at his laughter. Two intelligent creatures were being humiliated before their eyes; proud spirits were being broken. Ludicrous though the scene might be, no Earthman had a right to laugh. We may be dangling next, for all we know, Bernard thought somberly as he watched the outraged Norglans writhe.

  “Put us down!” Skrinri howled.

  “Come, show us your strength now, men of Imperial Norgla,” came the dry, mocking murmur of the Rosgollan spokesman. Calmly, they put into words their challenge. “You do not tolerate levitation, Norglans? Very well, then. Force us to stop.”