The Cold Equations

by Tom Godwin

  * * *

  Quick footsteps sounded inside and the door swung open. It was Colonel Primmer, Beeling's aide, turning with his hand still on the doorknob and almost bowing in the obsequious manner characteristic of him as he said, "You are so right, General Beeling. Yes, sir. At once, sir."

  He turned again and shut the door behind him. The fawning expression vanished from his red face at the sight of Rider and a cold, fishy look replaced it.

  "General Beeling is far too busy to see you," he said, "if that's what you're still waiting for."

  "It is," he answered. "Surely he can spare a few minutes. Right now we're two shakes away from a mass attack by the natives and if the chief isn't handled just right when he comes for the last talk this camp will be turned into a slaughter pen. Let me tell—"

  "I think," Primmer said, "that the Extraterrestrial Relations Board can successfully cope with a barbarian chieftain without first consulting a layman. As for that other matter with which you've been trying to annoy the general all day: he requested me to inform you that the helicopter will not be available to you, that there are issues before him of a great deal more importance than the life of your talking dog."

  Primmer turned to the guard, pointedly dismissing Rider. "Go tell Mantingly and Johnson that I want them here on the double. Tell Myers to bring his laborers here—"

  Rider turned away and went back down the street, wondering again how he could show Beeling the deadly danger of the situation. It was a hell of a problem—how could you convince a man who wouldn't let you talk to him?

  He detoured around a mound of crates—part of the huge mass of ERB equipment and supplies that had been hastily unloaded from the special Missions cruiser before it hurried back Earthward—and was met by a gust of wind that whipped the fine, poisonous sand against his face. Deneb, almost to the horizon, was going down with a purple halo around it and the desert to the southeast was a smoky azure. He could not tell for sure through the haze but the sky above the distant Sea Cliffs seemed to have turned black.

  If a storm was in progress there it would already be too late to take the helicopter more than part way to rescue Laughing Girl, the Altairian. But that made little difference—he had virtually no hope of altering Beeling's disdainful regard for what he called "the talking dogs." The helicopter would remain unavailable and he would have to find some other way of saving her.

  * * *

  Beeling's entire force of laborers and other non-ERB-commissioned personnel was at work along the street, erecting more prefabricated buildings to shelter the supplies. He noticed again the way they spoke to one another in lowered voices and glanced often toward the ragged hills that surrounded the valley. One of them, a red-haired boy, stepped out and spoke to him:

  "Sir—could I ask you a question?"

  He appraised the boy automatically: Nineteen, a long way from home, and trying not to show that he was scared.

  "Of course," he answered. "What is it?"

  "Is it true that the natives have been waiting for weeks for this ERB unit to come, so they could kill us all?"

  "They didn't even know you existed until you landed here," he said. "Who told you that?"

  "Why—" The boy looked suddenly uncomfortable. "I don't remember, sir."

  He did not press the question. It would have been something that came down from Beeling or Primmer.

  The others had stopped to listen, all of them showing to some degree the same uncertainty that was on the freckled face of the red-haired boy. They were young; the mechanically logical ERB had selected seventeen to twenty-two as the preferred aged for its performers of manual labor since men of that age were the hardiest and made the most efficient workers on worlds not suited to human life.

  The ERB encouraged laborer enlistments with colorful posters that promised: GOOD PAY AND HIGH ADVENTURE AWAIT YOU BEYOND THE STARS. The boys had thought, when they landed two days and nights before, that they had stepped across the threshold of the promised high adventure and they had been as excited as children. Now they were solemn and hushed as they tried to adjust themselves to the realization that there would be no adventure, no allure, in quick and violent death . . .

  "There may be trouble over your coming," he said, "but it won't be anything that was premeditated. There's a likely chance it won't happen at all. We'll know in a few minutes."

  He turned and walked off, feeling them silent and very thoughtful behind him.

  At the end of the street was the little building that had been his office until Beeling's arrival with the special order that had changed the Frontier Corps outpost to an ERB Primary Contact Field Installation. It was there that he and the natives had met and talked so many times in the past and it was there that old Chief Selsin would soon come to what might be the last meeting.

  He went inside and saw that his few remaining possessions had been piled in a corner pending further disposal. He walked on to the desk where the hyperspace communicator, borrowed from the Frontier ship, stood locked and silent. One of Beeling's first demands, as new commander of the outpost, had been for the hyperspace communicator's key. Beeling did not need the communicator—he had a similar model in his headquarters building—but a locked communicator could not be used by a displaced Frontier Corpsman to send unauthorized reports to Earth.

  The camp-to-ship radio was inside the communicator. He switched it on, to try again to reach his Frontier ship on Deneb One. The result was the same as before; a shrieking, roaring, ear-splitting blast of static. The sun was squarely between the two worlds and, since it was a white sun, its electronic emission was tremendous. Contact with the ship was utterly impossible.

  He changed the wave length to that of the little shortwave radio under the Sea Cliffs and signaled with the Beep button. There was no response, other than a harsh grinding of static from the storm he thought he had seen, which meant that Laughing Girl must still be out tending to the mineral detector.

  He switched the radio off, wondering what he could have told her if she had answered him.

  * * *

  "Captain—rook!"

  Loper, the other shaggy, dog-like Altairian, came running through the door, his eyes bright with excitement.

  "Are coming now—oh, hundreds and hundreds. Rook, Captain!"

  He looked, where a wide, low pass to the northeast led to the higher country beyond, and saw the natives coming down it. There were perhaps five hundred of them, coming with their dragon-beast mounts in a run, their long rifles across their saddles and their bronze battle helmets gleaming brightly in the late sunlight.

  There were nine columns and a different pennant fluttered at the head of each. Which meant that the Nine Tribes were solidly allied under the leadership of old Selsin until the business with the humans was settled.

  "Are stirr more coming farther back," Loper said. "Pretty soon awr around us wirr be the big rif'res that can kirr us. Why, Captain?" There was puzzled question in his dark eyes. "We not hurt any of them."

  "They're afraid we might," he said. "We're getting this one last chance to prove we won't."

  "If they not berieve us, how soon wirr they kirr us?"

  "I think they'll give us a chance to leave, first."

  "But we can't reave—our ship is gone."

  "That, Loper, is the big, repulsive fly that's in everybody's soup today."

  The columns of armed natives split as they reached the bottom of the pass, and raced to north and south along the valley's rim.

  "They going to surround us," Loper said. "If they say, 'You not pass,' we have to have the hericopter." He looked away from the natives and toward the Sea Cliffs. "She die there if we not come and nobody care. I not understand."

  To Loper it was still incomprehensible that there could be humans who did not like Altairians. He had known only the men of the Frontier ship, who regarded Altairians with the same affection they would have had for loyal and cheerful—and sometimes blundering—twelve-year-old children. Except when it was time
to meet the natives of a new world, when the Altairians' highly developed sense of empathy changed their role to that of invaluable coaches and advisors.

  * * *

  Frontier ships were always undermanned—each year the increasingly huge expenditures of the ERB forced the Space Board to cut the Frontier Corps budget to make up the difference—and the Altairians diligently performed all tasks of which they were capable. When the order came through to have Deneb One surveyed immediately he had needed to send his entire crew and had used Laughing Girl to replace the man tending the electronic mineral detector that had been set up under the Sea Cliffs. It was a job she could manage, since the detector was near-enough automatic in its operation that its supervision required no technical knowledge. This had enabled him to send a full crew to Deneb One, while he remained at camp with Loper to help him and continued the meetings with the natives.

  He had intended to take the helicopter to the Sea Cliffs a safe twenty hours in advance of the Big Tide and bring back Laughing Girl and the portable mineral detector. But Beeling had ordered: "Our only means of transportation will not be permitted to leave this camp until this trouble with the natives is fully settled."

  By then it would be too late. The three moons of Deneb Five possessed complex orbits that brought the Big Tide every ten days; a titanic bulge in the waters of the oceans that raced around the world at a speed of five hundred miles per hour. The three moons were already on the opposite side of the world, swinging close around it and bringing the Big Tide with them. It would strike the high, unscalable Sea Cliffs at sunrise and Laughing Girl, still faithfully tending the detector down under them and waiting for him to come for her, would be killed instantly.

  To the few of the ERB staff he had managed to talk to, his persistent requests for the helicopter had seemed ridiculous. "Really, Captain," one natty young lieutenant he had cornered outside Headquarters had said, "you're taking the loss of your mascot far too seriously. After all, you can pick up a dozen of the beasts the next time you pass Altair." . . .

  "We not got much time, Captain. Are we have to wait much ronger?"

  "Not much longer, Loper. Only until the talk with Selsin is over."

  "I think he come now."

  The long columns were still coming down the pass and parting at the bottom but one native was coming straight toward the camp in a slow trot. It was Selsin.

  * * *

  "—lively there! Faster, all of you . . ."

  The voice of Primmer, edged with strain, came from the street. Rider went to the window and looked out upon a scene of confused activity.

  Primmer, with two blasters buckled around him, was trying to post as many guards as possible as quickly as possible; all the laborers and technicians among them. They were being stationed around Headquarters, around the helicopter, and all along the windows of supplies in the street.

  "Damn!" he said aloud.

  Beeling could have done nothing worse than to order the show of armed defense at a time when everything depended upon regaining Selsin's trust.

  The door of the ERB Headquarters building opened and General Beeling stepped out, briskly despite his paunchy overweight. He strode down the street with his pink moon-face looking straight ahead, not glancing once toward the natives. He stopped a moment to say something to Primmer that caused most of Primmer's nervousness to vanish then came on with the bearing of calm purpose.

  "He not worried," Loper said. "How can he not worry now?"

  Beeling stepped through the doorway with cold satisfaction on his face and a look at Rider that said, I have your muddled situation well in hand, my man.

  "Good afternoon, General," Rider greeted him, and Loper said politely, "Her'ro, Generar Beering."

  Beeling's eyes flicked to Loper in brief curiosity then, without answering either of them, he seated himself behind the desk.

  "I presume you know we're surrounded, Rider?"

  There was the same vengeful satisfaction in his tone as on his face. Rider noticed, absently, that his blouse bulged with the bulk of a concealed blaster.

  "I knew they would come ready for war," he said. "When Selsin gets here we'll have our one last chance to avert it and I've been trying to see you all day to tell you we'll have to show Selsin the respect that—"

  "My dear Captain," Beeling interrupted, "I have been very busy the entire day supervising a review of all data and deciding upon the best method of counteracting the damage you have done. I feel rather certain that I know how to speak to the native."

  Rider kept his face expressionless and said with careful courtesy, "But couldn't you order the guards off duty before Selsin gets here, sir? He'll regard them as proof of suspicion and enmity on our part."

  The soft answer seemed to have slightly lessened Beeling's dislike for him; Beeling's next statement was more pompous than sarcastic:

  "On the contrary, that display of preparedness will prove to the natives that we are quite aware of their hostility and are not to be intimidated by it; that our request for friendship is sincere and does not spring from fear of them."

  Rider looked again at the guards, able to count only seven blasters among them, and back to Beeling. "You don't understand, sir—if they call our bluff we won't have a chance."

  Beeling's reply was to spread a sheaf of papers on the desk before him and say:

  "Here are the Analysis Sheets; the result of almost two days of work by myself and my staff and our computer. For your information, these natives are like children both in the awe and fear with which they regard our weapons and in their eagerness to possess the labor-saving machines, the luxury items and the pretty novelties of our 'grown-up' society. By dramatically presenting the two choices—the gift-laden helping hand or the unyielding fist—they cannot logically do other than ask for our friendship and gifts."

  "But it isn't that simple," he protested. "They'll—"

  Annoyance passed across Beeling's face and the full degree of coldness returned. "As I remarked, the procedure outlined by the Analysis will counteract the damage you have done. Insufficient data, however, leave two questions answered. One: why have your reports never mentioned the consistent enmity of the natives?"

  "Because no enmity ever existed. They were only exercising reasonable caution, due to the experience they had with that other alien race forty years ago."

  "Yes? Then perhaps you can answer the other question: why should this 'reasonable caution' flare so suddenly into a lust for war? What did you do to make them hate humans so?"

  "I lied to them. They were almost ready to agree to everything but they wanted a little more time in which to be sure that we would not betray their trust as that other alien race did. I gave my solemn promise as the representative of Earth that no reinforcements would come in the meantime. And within forty-eight hours after receiving its copy of my report to the Frontier Corps, the ERB had you and thirty men and a hundred tons of supplies on the way to Deneb.

  "Just what do you suppose the natives thought of my truthfulness—of the truthfulness of any human—when that cruiser dropped down out of the sky and men and equipment began rolling out of it?"

  "I see," Beeling said acidly. "You were the innocent victim of unfair circumstances. But, as the ERB informed the Supreme Council, you had accomplished nothing concrete in your six months here and this world was too badly needed by Earth to permit any more cautious delays. Despite anguished wails of protest from the Frontier Corps we persuaded the Supreme Council to transfer command of this outpost to the ERB. I was dispatched at once to analyze the situation, to remedy whatever mistakes you had made, and to gain the cooperation of the natives as quickly as possible.

  "I trust"—the acidic dislike increased—"that properly explains my presence here."

  Loper lifted his ears toward the door and Rider heard the squeak of saddle leather.

  "I hope your plans work out the way you think," he said. "Selsin is here."

  * * *

  Selsin was so big that h
is bulk in the doorway half darkened the room as he came through. He was seven feet tall, black as coal, with muscles that bulged and rippled as he walked. He had the thin, curved nose and pointed ears of a devil, while his green, glittering eyes under slanting brows added to his satanic appearance.

  His bristling blue-gray head was bare; he had left his helmet on his saddle, together with his rifle and sword, as a gesture of peaceful intention.

  "Chief Selsin!" Beeling rose, smiling. "You honor us. I'm sorry there was no one to meet you—I told my aide—"

  "It is of no importance." Selsin spoke in accented Terran. "I came to hear you, not your assistant."

  "Ah—of course. Will you sit down?"

  Selsin did so, the chair creaking under his weight. He waited for Beeling to speak, regarding him with a mocking half smile. The smile was meaningless—the cheek muscles of the natives were different from those of humans and caused their lips to turn upward at the corners—but it could be rather disconcerting to a human at first.