Collision Course Read online

  “Look at the vision port,” Stone breathed. “The stars—they aren’t there!”

  Bernard spun around. It was true. A moment before, the port, a three-by-four television screen that gave direct pickup from the skin of the ship, had been dazzling with the glory of the stars. Unending cascades of brightness had glinted against the airless black. Some of the planets had been visible against the backdrop of the Milky Way: red Mars, gem-like Venus.

  Now all that was gone. Stars, planets, cascades of bright glory. The screen showed a featureless gray. It was as though the universe had been blotted out.

  Once again the bulkhead light flashed. Stone pushed the switch to admit, this time, John Laurance himself.

  “We’ve made the conversion successfully, gentlemen. What you see on the screen is a completely empty universe in which we’re the only bit of matter.”

  Stone said, “In that case, what do you steer by?”

  Laurance shrugged. “Rule of thumb. The unmanned ships were sent into no-space; they travelled along certain vectors that we’ve charted, and they came out someplace else. For lack of landmarks we just follow our noses.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a very efficient way of getting places,” Dominici said.

  “It isn’t,” Laurance admitted. “But we don’t happen to have any other choice.”

  Bernard studied the spaceman closely. Fatigue was evident in every line of Laurance’s craggy face. The oddly soft eyes were red with shattered capillaries. They said that Laurance needed no more than three hours of sleep out of each twenty-four; but it would seem, just to look at him, that he had not even been getting his normal minimum.

  “You look tired, Commander,” the sociologist said.

  Again Laurance shrugged. “I am, Dr. Bernard. All of my men are tired. Again—we don’t have any other choice.”

  “Is it safe to operate a complicated ship like this if you’re overtired?”

  “The Technarch seemed to think so,” replied Laurance with what seemed a lingering trace of bitterness. “The Technarch was in an almighty hurry to get this ship back out into space again.”

  “We have faith in the Technarch,” said Dominici. “McKenzie’s got as good a head on his shoulders as old Bengstrom ever had. He must have some reason for wanting the hurry-up.”

  “Technarch McKenzie is but a mortal man,” Havig remarked. “He’s subject to error.”

  Dominici lifted an eyebrow. “There are people who’d fall down in catatonic shock if you ever said anything like that about an Archon in their hearing, Havig.”

  “I have no exaggerated awe for these men. They were chosen from among mankind,” the Neopuritan went on.

  “Yes,” Bernard said. “Chosen in their teens and trained for decades in the art of ruling, before they eventually take over their Archonates. It’s obviously a good system, the first really workable system of government Earth as a whole has ever had. But Commander Laurance didn’t come in here to discuss the Technarch’s qualifications with us, I imagine.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Laurance said with a grave smile. “I came in to tell you that all was well with the ship, that we’ll be eating in half an hour, and that we expect to be in the neighborhood of Star NGCR 185143 in, oh, about seventeen hours plus or minus a few seconds.” Laurance paused just a moment, long enough to consolidate his dominance in the little group. Then he said, “Ah—Mister Clive tells me you’re all a bit edgy back there. That you’ve even been doing some bickering.”

  Bernard reddened. He was positive that there was the beginning of contempt in Laurance’s eyes, contempt of the hardbitten spaceman for the soft academics in the cabin.

  Out of the embarrassed silence came, as usual, Stone’s mollifying voice. “We’ve had our little disagreements, yes, Commander. Minor differences of opinion…”

  “I understand, gentlemen,” Laurance said blandly—but behind the blandness lay solid steel. “May I remind you that you’ve been entrusted with a very great responsibility. I hope you’ll have settled your—ah—’minor differences’ before we reach your destination.”

  “Matter of fact, we just about have them under control now,” Stone said.

  “Good.” Laurance moved toward the door. “You’ll find a packet of relaxotabs in the medical supply cabinet over there to my left, just in case your ‘edginess’ should continue and become a serious problem. I’ll expect you in the fore galley in half an hour.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence after Laurance had gone. Then Dominici said, “That fellow’s almost as regal as the Technarch, you know? They’re of the same breed. ‘May I remind you that you’ve been entrusted with a very great responsibility,’ ” he mimicked. “The Commander’s got the same lordly way of telling you off and making you feel three feet high that McKenzie has.”

  “Maybe Laurance is a trainee who didn’t quite make the grade for the Archonate,” Stone suggested quietly. As a trainee himself—for the Archonate of Colonial Affairs—he might be expected to know something of the inside story of maneuvering for high office.

  But Bernard said, “It just isn’t likely, really. McKenzie wouldn’t trust a runner-up with anything as big as this; too much rivalry involved. But it’s always possible that Laurance is one of the next generation of trainees. For all we know, he’s been picked to succeed McKenzie some day.”

  “Would McKenzie risk losing his hand-picked successor in a dangerous flight like this?” Dominici asked.

  “A Technarch must be forged in the crucible of danger,” Havig observed. “If Laurance could not survive a voyage in space, how would he survive the pressures of office? This may be a testing flight.”

  “You may have something there,” Stone admitted.

  There were no further speculations. The tension and uncertainty of the job that lay ahead of them dulled conversation, made them all jumpy and restless.

  When a half hour had elapsed, the four went up front for the meal. The menu was an array of synthetics, of course—but synthetics lovingly prepared by Nakamura and Hernandez, who approached the job of meal-making the way other men might approach the writing of poetry. After the meal, the four passengers made their way rearward to their cabin.

  More than sixteen hours remained to the no-space leg of their journey. Time was crawling; it might just as well have been sixteen years of traveling ahead.

  Bernard settled into his acceleration cradle and tried to read; but it was no use. Obtrusive thoughts of danger got between his mind and his book. The words danced on the page, and the delicate imagery of Suyamo’s classic verse blurred into hopeless confusion. In complete disgust, Bernard slammed the book shut.

  He closed his eyes. After a while, the babel of thought slackened, and he fell into a light, uneasy sleep that gradually deepened.

  Some time later, he groped his way back to wakefulness. A glance at the cabin clock told him that only four hours yet remained till transition, so he had been asleep nearly twelve. It surprised him. He had not thought he was as fatigued as that, to let twelve hours slip away almost instantaneously in sleep.

  He looked around the cabin. Dominici was fast asleep, his eyes screwed shut, his mouth contorted in a peculiar grimace. He was twisting and turning as he slept; obviously he was having a bad dream. Bernard wondered if he had looked as restless and troubled in his sleep.

  Next to him, Stone sat peering endlessly out the vision port at nothing whatever. Realizing that Bernard was awake, Stone turned and flashed a quick, insincere grin, then turned his attention back to the port.

  Only Havig seemed at peace with himself and with the mysterious environment outside. The big man leaned back, his long legs stretched forward in a rare gesture of relaxation. A book lay open in Havig’s lap—a prayerbook, probably, Bernard thought. The Neopuritan was turning the pages slowly, nodding, occasionally smiling to himself. He took no notice of anything about him. The very tranquility of the man irritated Bernard obscurely.

  Bernard forced himself to stop thinking about
the frictions that existed in the cabin, and to ponder the enigmatic nature of the aliens waiting ahead.

  He had seen their photos, in tridim and color, and so he had at least a tentative idea of what to expect physically.

  But yet he looked forward to the coming meeting with complete uncertainty. Would contact be possible, communication of even the simplest sort? And if they could speak to each other, would an agreement be forthcoming? Or was the civilization of men doomed to be racked by an interstellar war that would send the centuries-old peace imposed by the Archonate crumbling?

  The rise of the oligarchy, Bernard thought, had ended the confusion and doubt of the Nightmare Years. But what if the aliens refused to meet and enter into peaceful treaties? What would the strength of the Archonate be worth then?

  He had no answers. He forced himself to concentrate on his reading. The hours marched past, until the gong sounded once again, as if foretelling an apocalypse.

  The sound of the gong died away. Transition was made.

  The vision screen exploded into brilliant life. New constellations; eye-numbing new clusters of stars, perhaps including among them a dot of light that was Earth’s sun.

  And, hanging before them like a blazing ball, was a golden-yellow sun darkened by the shadow of planets in transit across its disk.

  FIVE

  The ship swung “downward,” cutting across the ecliptic plane to seek out the orbit of the fourth of the golden star’s eleven worlds. Assuming an observation orbit five hundred fifty miles above the planet, the XV-ftl zipped round four times before spying the alien settlement. It lay in the shadowed nightside of the planet. The encroaching path of brightness, peeling the night away from the turning planet, told that the alien settlement was not many hours from dawn. In the rear cabin, Martin Bernard and his fellow negotiators lay strapped in, shielded against the atmospheric buffeting of landing, waiting the minutes out as the XV-ftl dropped in ever-narrowing spirals toward the darkness below. Bernard felt strangely helpless as the ship coiled through its landing orbit. Here I am, he thought, trussed into a mattress like a child in the womb waiting to be born. And no more capable of landing this ship than a child in the womb is of delivering himself and cutting the umbilicus.

  Queasiness of the stomach assailed him. His life, all their lives, lay in the hands of five bloodshot, tired men. A miscalculation in somebody’s computations and they might smash into the unnamed planet below at fifty thousand miles a second. Or they might miss the planet altogether, have to come back and make another nervewracking pass at it.

  Bernard swiveled his head backward until his eyes met Stone’s. The pudgy diplomat’s face was pale and glossy with sweat. But he managed to grin.

  “I don’t go much for this spaceship travel,” Bernard said. “How about you?”

  “Give me transmat every time,” Stone murmured. “But we can’t very well be choosy this trip, eh?”

  “Guess not,” Bernard admitted. “No choice of accomodations for us.”

  He fell silent again, reminded once again of how little scope for free action a human being really had. The dully deterministic fact had been hammered home to him in his undergraduate days, when he had first encountered the damnably unanswerable set of sociometric equations that covered most of man’s traits and behavior patterns. There’s hardly any choice. We’re prisoners of—well, call it necessity for lack of a neater term. The only choices we get are low-level ones; and maybe we aren’t even really choosing then.

  The ship jounced down through the atmosphere. It was a bumpy drop; Bernard was grateful for the cradle he nestled in. He had never realized that spaceship travel was as crude and as clumsy as this. A transmat trip was clean, sharp, like the blade of a microtome: you stepped in, you stepped out, and you were there. None of this tiresome business of acceleration and deceleration, matching velocities, actions-and-equal-but-opposite reactions.

  He smiled, thinking how little he actually knew about the physics of space travel. He, who had spent his honeymoon on a green pleasure-world in the Sirius system, who had vacationed on planets orbiting Beta Centauri and Bellatrix and Eta Ursae Majoris, was hazier on the Newtonian facts of life than most schoolboys building their first model rockets. Blame it on the transmat, he thought. No one cared how a rocketship worked when he could step through cool green flame and exit four hundred light-years from home.

  Bernard eyed the planet growing in the viewscreen. They were too close to regard it as a sphere, now; it had flattened tremendously, and nearly a third of its area was outside the screen’s subtended angle of vision.

  As the XV-ftl whirled past dayside, Bernard caught glimpses of great continents lying in a blue-green sea like slabs of meat against a table. All was motionless, even the fleecy wisps of cloud far below, the dark blotch of a raging storm. Then they were plunged into night, and only indistinct shapes could be seen.

  Emerging into dayside again, now the bright threads of the bigger rivers could be picked out. One vast waterway seemed to travel diagonally across the biggest continent, cutting a channel from northeast to southwest and proliferating into hundreds of smaller streams. Mountain ranges rose like buckled humps in the far west and north. Most of the continent was a verdant green, shading into a darker color toward the north and in the highlands.

  Closing his eyes, Bernard choked back his dizziness and waited for the moment of landing.

  It came some time later; he realized he had dozed, an after-effect of the deceleration pills Nakamura had handed out at the last meal. But he woke suddenly, as if having a premonition of arrival, and, moments afterward, he sensed a gentle thump. That was all.

  It had been a perfect landing.

  The voice of Laurance came over the intercabin speaker: “We’ve made our landing without trouble. Our landing-point is some ten or twelve miles east of the alien settlement. The sun is due to rise here in about an hour. We’ll be leaving the ship as soon as routine area decontamination is carried out.”

  The routine decontamination took only a few minutes. Then, once all radiation products incident to the landing had been sluiced away, the hatch slid open and the air of another world came filtering into the ship.

  He stood at the lip of the hatch now, testing the air. It was much like Earth’s; but there was a fraction more of oxygen in it, not enough of an overplus to jeopardize health but just enough to give the air a rich, heady quality. It was almost like breathing fine white wine. He felt, after a few inhalations, a confidence that had deserted him in the dark hours just before landing.

  “Let’s go, Dr. Bernard,” Peterszoon called to him from below. “We can’t wait all day.”

  “Sorry,” Bernard said. He reddened and hastily clambered down the catwalk to the ground. The five crewmen were there already. Stone, Dominici, and Havig followed.

  A fresh morning breeze, slightly chill, swept down across the meadow in which they had landed. The sky was still gray, and a few last stars of morning still glimmered faintly. But pink streaks of dawning were beginning to splash across the sky. The temperature, Bernard estimated, was in the forties or fifties: promise of a warm morning. The air had the transparent freshness one found only on a virgin world where the belch of a furnace was unknown.

  It might have been Earth on some ninth-century morning, thought Bernard; but there were differences, subtle but none the less positive ones. The grass under their feet, only to take one; its blue-green blades sprouted triple from the stalk, twisting round each other in a complex little pattern before springing upward. No grass on Earth had ever grown in such a way.

  The trees—looming evergreens two hundred feet high, their boles a dozen feet thick at the base—were different, too. Cones three feet long dangled from the nearest; its bark was pale yellow, ruffled by horizontal striations; its leaves were broad glossy green knives, a foot long, two inches wide. Crickets chittered underfoot, but when Bernard caught sight of one he saw it was a grotesque little creature three or four inches long, green with beady golden
eyes and a savage little beak. Great oval toadstools with table-like tops a foot or more in diameter sprouted everywhere in the meadow, bright purple against the blue-green. Dominici knelt to touch one and it crumbled like a dream when his finger grazed the fungus’ rim.

  For the long moment, no one spoke. Bernard felt a sort of tingle of awe, and knew the others were sharing his emotion; the wonder of setting foot on a planet where mankind and civilization had not yet begun to work changes. This was the planet as it had come from the maker’s hand, and even a nonbeliever like Bernard could respond to that.

  The men were silent, hearing the cool wind whistle sighingly through the towering trees, hearing the unseen harmonious symphony of crickets and the awakening, dawn-hungry birds, and perhaps the deeper cry of some unknown forest beast thrashing through the black thicket to the south.

  And then the wonder faded.

  This world was not unmarred, Bernard thought.

  Perhaps mankind had not yet set down a colony here— but others had.

  It was a grim thing to call to mind in the midst of this primeval beauty, the ugly reminder of their purpose in coming here. Bernard’s expression darkened. How could a world this lovely be a menace to Earth? The world itself was not the menace, he thought. It merely symbolized the threat of two colliding cultures.

  Laurance cut into his mood, saying quietly, “We’ll proceed to the alien village on foot. There are two landsleds aboard the ship, but I’m not going to use them.”

  “Is the hike necessary?” Bernard said.

  “I feel it is,” Laurance replied, hiding none too well his annoyance of Bernard’s love of comfort. “I feel it might look too much like an armed invasion to the aliens if we came rolling up inside the landsleds. We might never get a chance to tell them we were friendly.”

  “In that case, what about weapons?” Dominici said. “Do you have enough to spare for the four of us? If we have to defend ourselves, we…”