Collision Course Read online

“Weapons?” Laurance repeated, startled. “Do you really expect to carry weapons?”

  “Well…” the biophysicist stammered, thrown off balance by Laurance’s tone. “Of course I thought we’d be armed, just as a precautionary measure. Alien beings—you yourself said they might be surprised when we approach them…”

  Laurance grimly tapped the magnum pistol at his side. “I’m carrying the only weapon we’ll need.”

  “But…”

  “If the aliens react to us with hostility,” said Laurance in a dry voice, “you may quite possibly all become martyrs to the cause of Terran diplomacy. I hope each of you is thoroughly reconciled to that fact right here and now. I’d ten times as much rather see us all shot to ashes by alien blasters than to have some jumpy negotiator fly off the handle and pump bullets into them just because one of his private neuroses has been activated. It isn’t wise to make a ten-mile overland journey through unknown territory without some sort of weapon, which is why I’m carrying this. But I’m damned if I’m going to let all of us walk into that alien camp looking like an invasion party.” He glanced around, his eyes coming to rest in turn on Dominici, Havig, Stone, and Bernard. “Is that perfectly clear?” Laurance asked.

  No one replied. Uncomfortably, Bernard scratched his cheek and tried to look as though he were reconciled to the idea of martyrdom. He wasn’t.

  “No objections,” Laurance said, more relaxedly. “Good. “We’re agreed, then. I carry the gun; I’m alone answerable for the consequences of my carrying it. Believe me, I’m not worried about my survival so much as I am about someone else’s rash actions. Are there any other questions?”

  Hearing none, Laurance shrugged. “Very well. We’ll set out at once.”

  He turned, checking his position against a tiny compass that was embedded, along with several other indicators, in the sleeve of his leather jacket, and nodded toward the west. Without further preamble or prologue, he began to walk.

  Nakamura and Peterszoon fell in wordlessly behind him, Clive and Hernandez back of them. The five men trudged off at a good clip, none of them looking around to see if the negotiators were following.

  Shrugging, Bernard scurried after the five rapidly retreating spacemen, Dominici jogging alongside him. Stone followed, with Havig, reserved and self-contained as ever, bringing up the rear.

  “They don’t treat us as if we’re very important,” Bernard complained to Dominici. “They seem to forget that we’re the reason they’re here.”

  “They don’t forget it,” Dominici growled. “They just feel contempt for lazy Earthlubbers like us. They resent our existence. ‘Transmat people,’ they call us, with a sort of arrogant sneer in their voices. As though there’s something really morally wrong about taking the quickest possible route between two points.”

  “Only insofar as it weakens the body’s capacity for endurance,” Havig said quietly from the rear. “Anything which makes us less fit to bear the burden of earthly existence is morally wrong.”

  “Taking the transmat does breed some bad habits,” Bernard said, surprised to find himself on the same side as Havig for a change. “We lose a sense of appreciation of the universe. Since the transmat was invented we’ve completely forgotten what the fact of distance really means. We don’t think of time as a function of distance any more; they do. And to the extent that we can’t control our impatience, we’re weaklings in a spaceman’s eyes.”

  “And all of us weaklings in God’s eyes,” Havig said. “But some of us more prepared to go to Him than others.”

  “Shut up,” Dominici said without rancor. “We might all be going to Him in a very short time. Don’t remind me.”

  “Are you afraid of dying?” Havig asked.

  “Just annoyed by the thought of not getting done everything I’d like to,” Dominici said. “Let’s get off the topic.”

  “And let’s stay off it,” Bernard said vehemently, “That one-track philosopher back there is going to peddle piety once too often, and…”

  “Watch it,” Stone murmured warningly.

  They fell silent. The path was on a slight upgrade, and despite the tiny extra percentage of oxygen in the air Bernard soon found himself puffing and panting. He had made a point of keeping himself in trim with a weekly visit to an exercise house in Djakarta, but now he was speedily discovering the measurable psychological difference between doing pushups in a gym under relaxed conditions and climbing a steady upgrade on an alien world.

  Anxiety toxins were flooding his body now, willy-nilly. The poison of fear added to the fatigue of his muscles, slowing him down. He dropped back a little, letting Dominici move ahead. Once, he stumbled, and Havig caught his elbow to steady him; when he looked around Bernard saw the Neopuritan grin briefly and heard him say, “All of us stumble on our paths, friend.”

  Bernard was too weary to retort. Havig seemed to have an unearthly knack for turning even the most minor incident into an occasion for homily. Or, Bernard wondered wearily, what if Havig were only spoofing, parodying himself much of the time in a ponderous kind of humor? No, he thought, Havig didn’t have a scrap of humor anywhere in his huge frame. When he said something he meant it.

  Bernard pushed ahead. Laurance and his men, moving along up front, never seemed to flag. They strode on like men in seven-league boots, clearing a way through the sometimes impassable brush that blocked the path; detouring skillfully to circle a fallen tree whose man-high trunk, already overgrown with yellow fungus, prevented advance; pausing to estimate the depth of a dark, swiftly flowing stream before plunging across through water that sometimes rose as high as the tops of their hip-boots.

  He was beginning to lose his appreciation of this planet’s wild beauty. Even beauty can pall, especially under circumstances of discomfort. The blazing glory of purple flowers a foot across no longer registered on Bernard. The sleek grace of the white, cat-like creatures that bolted across their paths like streaks of flame no longer pleased him. The raucous, almost obscene cries of the birds in the towering trees no longer seemed amusing, but merely insulting.

  Bernard had never realized in any concrete way that the abstract term “ten miles” meant quite so many weary steps. His feet felt numb, his calves stiff and throbbing, his thighs already beginning to develop a charley-horse that bid fair to double him up. And they had hardly begun to walk, he thought glumly. He felt ready to collapse, after only half an hour’s march.

  Think we’re almost there?” he asked Dominici.

  The stocky biochemist wrinkled his face in good-hearted scorn. “You kidding? We haven’t walked more than two and a half, three miles at most. Relax, Bernard. There’s plenty going ahead.”

  Bernard nodded. A pace of ten minutes per mile was probably generous, he thought. Most likely they had done no more than two miles—a fifth or a sixth of the journey. And he was tired already.

  But there was no help for it but to plug gamely on. The day had all but begun, now; the sky was bright and the sun seemed hidden just below the distant trees, biding its moment until bursting forth. The air had grown considerably warmer, too, the temperature climbing well into the sixties. Bernard had opened his jacket. He dipped frequently into his canteen, hoping the water would last him the round trip. Their last time here, Laurance and his men had tested the water and found it to be unobjectionable H2O, presumably readily drinkable. But there had been no time for elaborate checks on microorganic life. Improbable though it was that a nonterrestrial organism could have serious effects on a Terran metabolism, Bernard was not minded to take chances.

  At the end of the first hour they rested, leaning against the massive stumps of fallen trees.

  “Tired?” Laurance asked.

  Stone nodded; Bernard grunted his assent. A twinkle appeared in Laurance’s eyes. “So am I,” he admitted cheerfully. “But we’ll keep going.”

  The sun rose finally a few minutes after they had resumed their trek. It burst into the sky gloriously, a young sun radiant in its youth. The temperature
continued to climb; it was above seventy, now. Bernard realized bleakly that it was likely to reach ninety or better by high noon. He remembered that medieval jingle: Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. He smiled at the thought. No more than once or twice a year did he think of himself as an Englishman, even though he was Manchester born and London bred. That was another effect of a transmat civilization; it provided such marvelous motility that no one really thought of himself as tied to one nation, one continent, even one world. Only in odd little moments of sudden insight did it occur to Bernard to regard himself as an Englishman, and thus in some nebulous way heir to the traditions of Alfred and William and Richard the Lion-Hearted and Churchill and the other titans of the misty past.

  Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Dr. Martin Bernard flicked sweat from his forehead and grimly forced his legs to continue carrying him forward.

  SIX

  It became purely mechanical after a while, and he stopped feeling sorry for himself and concentrated all his physical and mental energy on dragging one leg after another after another. And the yards lengthened into miles, and the distance between the spaceship and the alien encampment shrank. Nothing like a ten-mile hike in seventy- or eighty-degree heat to teach a transmat person what the concept of distance means, Bernard thought. He was finding out. Distance meant sweat pouring down your face and trickling into your eyes; distance meant the back of your boot gradually rubbing one of your heels raw; distance meant that bunchy, cramped feeling in the fleshy part of your leg, the bitter aching of your foot’s small bones, the steady pain in the forepart of your thigh. And this was only a ten-mile hike.

  “I wonder how good a hiker the Technarch is?” Dominici asked irreverently.

  “A damned good one, more likely than not,” Bernard muttered. “That’s why he’s a Technarch. He’s got to be able to outdo everyone in everything, whether it’s hiking or quantum mechanics.”

  “Still, I’d like to see him out here sweating under this blasted sun, with…” The biophysicist paused. “They’re stopping, up ahead. Maybe we’ve arrived.”

  “I hope so. We’ve been marching close to three hours.”

  Up ahead, the procession had indeed come to a halt. Laurance and his men had stopped at the summit of a gently rising hill. Peterszoon was pointing into the valley, and Laurance was nodding.

  As Bernard caught up to them, he saw what they were pointing at in the valley. It was the alien settlement.

  The colony had been built on the west bank of a fast-flowing river about a hundred yards wide. It nestled in a broad green valley that was bordered on one side by the group of hills in which the Earthmen now stood, and on the other by a wide, gently upcurving thrust that rose into snub-nosed mountains several miles away.

  In the colony, furious activity seemed to be the order of business. The aliens scurried like energetic insects.

  They had built six rows of domed huts, radiating outward from a larger central building. Work was proceeding—no, boiling ahead—on other huts that would extend the radii of the colony’s spokes. In the distance, gouts of dirt sprang high as the aliens, using what seemed to be a hand-gripped excavating device of force-field nature, dug out the foundations for yet more of the six-sided, stiff little huts. Others were working on a well on the landward side of the colony, while still others clustered around curious machinery, unpacking crates and dragging bulky devices (generators? dynamos?) across the clearing.

  Some thousand yards to the north of the main scene of activity stood a massive blue spaceship—adhering in the main to the cylindrical form, but strangely fluted and scalloped in superficial design to provide an unmistakably alien effect. The spaceship stood open, and aliens streamed to and fro, bearing material out of the big ship.

  After he had taken in the first surprising sight of the furiously energetic colonizers, Bernard turned his attention to the aliens themselves, not without a chill. At this distance, better than five hundred yards, it was hard to see the creatures in great detail. But they bore themselves upright, like human beings, and only their skin coloration and the odd free-swinging motion of their double-elbowed arms bore witness to their unearthliness.

  He could see that they came in two sorts: the green ones, which were overwhelmingly in the majority, and the blue-skinned ones. These seemed to be overseers; color-supremacy, he wondered? It would be interesting sociologically to run into a species that still practiced color-dominance. Perhaps these aliens would be surprised or revolted to learn of the presence of two black men and a yellow one on the Archonate that ruled Terra, he thought.

  Be that as it may, the blue aliens were definitely in charge, shouting orders that could just barely be heard on the hillside. And the green ones obeyed. The colony was being assembled in almost obscene haste.

  “We’re going to march down the hillside and right into that colony,” Laurance said quietly. “Dr. Bernard, you’re nominally in charge of the negotiations, and I won’t question that—but remember that I’m responsible for the safety of all of us, and my instructions will have to be final, no questions asked.”

  It seemed to Bernard that Laurance was arrogating altogether too much responsibility to himself in this expedition. The Technarch had never openly stated that Laurance was to be absolute boss. But the sociologist was not minded to raise questions of leadership at this point; Laurance seemed to know what was best, and Bernard was content to leave matters at that. He moistened his lips and looked down into the bustling valley.

  “The important thing to remember is not to show any sign of fear. Dr. Bernard, you’ll march in front with me. Dominici, Nakamura, Peterszoon, follow right behind us. Then Stone, Havig, Clive, Hernandez. It’ll be a kind of blunt-tipped triangle. Stay in formation, walk slowly and calmly, and whatever you do don’t show any sign of tension or fear.” Laurance glanced quickly around the group, as if checking on their resources of courage. “If they look menacing, just smile at them. Don’t break and bolt unless there’s an out-and-out attack on us. Stay calm, level-headed, and remember that you’re Earthmen, the first earthmen ever to walk up to an alien being and say ‘hello.’ Let’s do it the right way. Dr. Bernard, up front with me, please.”

  Bernard joined Laurance and they began the descent of the hill, with the others following in assigned order. As he walked, Bernard tried to relax. Shoulders back, legs loose. Get that stiffness out of your neck, Bernard! Inner tension shows up on the outside. Look at your ease!

  But it was easier said than done. He was bone-weary from the long hike, and the sodium-chloride tablet he had swallowed not long ago was taking its time in replenishing the salt he had sweated out during the morning. There was the physical tension of fatigue; and there was the far greater mental tension of knowing that he was walking down a hillside into a settlement built by intelligent beings who were not in the slightest “human.”

  For a long moment it seemed as though the aliens would never notice the nine Earthmen filing toward them. The non-terrestrials were so busy with their construction tasks that they did not look up. Laurance and Bernard advanced at a steady pace, saying nothing, and they had covered perhaps a hundred paces before any of the aliens reacted to their arrival.

  The first reaction came when a worker stripping felled logs happened to glance up and see the Earthmen. The alien seemed to freeze, peering uncomprehendingly at the advancing group. Then he nudged his fellow-worker in an amusingly human gesture.

  “They see us now,” Bernard whispered.

  “I know,” Laurance answered. “Let’s just keep on going toward them.”

  Consternation appeared to be spreading among the green-skinned workers. They had virtually halted all construction now to stare at the newcomers. Closer, Bernard could make out their features; their eyes were immense goggling things, which gave them a look of astonishment which perhaps they did not feel inwardly.

  The attention of one of the blue-skinned overseers had been attracted. He came over to see why work had
stopped; then, spying the Earthmen, he recoiled visibly, double-elbowed arms flapping at his sides in what was probably a genuine reaction of surprise.

  He called across the construction area to another blueskin, who came on a jogtrot after hearing the hoarse cry. With cautious tread the two aliens moved toward the Earthmen, taking each step with care and obviously remaining poised for a quick retreat.

  “They’re just as scared of us as we are of them,” Bernard heard Dominici mutter behind him. “We must look like nightmare horrors coming down out of the hills.”

  Only a hundred feet separated the two aliens from Bernard and Laurance. The remaining nonterrestrials had ceased work entirely; dropping their tools, they were bunching together behind the two blueskins, staring with what seemed to be apprehension at the Earthmen.

  The sun was merciless; Bernard’s shirt plastered itself to his skin. He murmured to Laurance, “We ought to show some gesture of friendliness. Otherwise they may get scared and gun us down just to be on the safe side.”

  “All right,” Laurance whispered. In a louder voice he said, without turning his head, “Attention, everyone: slowly bring your hands up and hold them forward, palms outward. Slowly! That might convince ’em that we’re coming with peaceful intentions.”

  Heart pounding, Bernard slowly lifted his arms and turned his palms forward. Only fifty feet separated him from the aliens, now. They had stopped moving. He and Laurance still led the slow, deliberate advance across the clearing under the blazing sun.

  He studied the two blueskins. They seemed to be about the average height of a man, possibly a little taller—as much as six feet two or three. They wore only a loose, coarsely woven, baggy yellow garment round their waists. Their dark blue skins were shiny with sweat, which argued that the aliens were metabolically pretty much like Earthmen, and their huge, saucer-like eyes flicked back and forth from one Terran face to the next, demonstrating not only curiosity but a probable stereoscopic vision-pattern.