"I don't know. I've got to settle this."
The doppler showed X was again creeping toward Sol at about 10 kilometers an hour.
"Does it seem likely there'd be power left after two thousand years to operate such a mechanism?" Laura asked.
"I think so. Each passenger section had a hydrogen power lamp." He dug out the microfilm again. "Yeah. a small fusion lamp for electricity to light and heat the section, and to run the emergency equipment for . . ." His voice trailed off, then continued in a dazed tone: "For recycling food and water."
"Marty, what is it?"
He stood up, staring at the plan. "The only radios were in the lifeboats, and the lifeboats are gone. I wonder . . . sure. The explosion could have torn them apart, blown them away, so . . ."
"What are you talking about?"
He looked again at their communicator. "A transmitter that can get through the noise between here and Pluto wouldn't be easy to jury-rig, even now. In the Old Empire days . . . "
"What?"
"Now about air—" He seemed to wake up with a start, looked at her sheepishly. "Just an idea that hit me." He grinned. "I'm making another trip."
An hour later he was landing on X for the third time, touching down near the "stern." He was riding the moving hull toward the anchor, but it was still many kilometers away.
The spot he had picked was near another small auxiliary airlock, upon which he began work immediately. After ascertaining that the inner door was closed, he drilled a hole in the outer door to relieve any pressure in the chamber to keep the outer door shut. The door opening mechanism suffered from twenty-century cramp, but a vibrator tool shook it loose enough to be operated by hand. The inside of the airlock looked like nothing more than the inside of an airlock.
He patched the hole he had made in the outer door so he would be able—he hoped—to open the inner one normally. He operated the outer door several times to make sure he could get out fast if he had to. After attaching a few extras from the bike to his suit, he said a quick and cheerful goodbye to Laura—not expecting his radio to work from inside the hull—and closed himself into the airlock. Using the vibrator again, he was able to work the control that should let whatever passed for hull atmosphere into the chamber. It came. His wrist gauge told him pressure was building up to approximately spaceship normal, and his suit mikes began to pick up a faint hollow humming from somewhere. He very definitely kept suit and helmet sealed.
The inner door worked perfectly, testifying to the skill of the Old Empire builders. Marty found himself nearly upside down as he went through, losing his footing and his sense of heroic adventure. In return he gained the knowledge that X's artificial gravity was still at least partly operational. Righting himself, he found that he was in a small anteroom banked with spacesuit lockers, now illuminated only by his suit lights but showing no other signs of damage. There was a door in each of the other walls.
He moved to try the one at his right. First drawing his blaster, he hesitated a moment, then slid it back into its holster. Swallowing, he eased the door open to find only another empty compartment, about the size of an average room and stripped of everything down to the bare deck and bulkheads.
Another door led him into a narrow passage where a few overhead lights burned dimly. Trying to watch over his shoulder and ahead at the same time, he followed the hall to a winding stair and began to climb, moving with all the silence possible in a spacesuit. The stair brought him out onto a long gallery overlooking what could only be the main corridor of X, a passage twenty meters wide and three decks high; it narrowed away to a point in the dimlit distance.
A man came out of a doorway across the corridor, a deck below Marty.
He was an old man and may have been nearsighted, for he seemed unaware of the spacesuited figure gripping a railing and staring down at him. The old man wore a sort of tunic intricately embroidered with threads of different colors, and well tailored to his thin figure, leaving his legs and feet bare. He stood for a moment peering down the long corridor, while Marty stared, momentarily frozen in shock.
Marty pulled back two slow steps from the railing, to where he stood mostly in shadow. Turning his head to follow the old man's gaze, he noticed that the forcefield where the anchors traveled was visible, running in a sunken strip down the center of the corridor. When the interstellar ship of which X was once a part had been in normal use, the strip might have been covered with a moving walkway of some kind.
The old man turned his attention to a tank where grew a mass of plants with flat, dark green leaves. He touched a leaf, then turned a valve that doled water into the tank from a thin pipe. Similar valves were clustered on the bulkhead behind the old man, and pipes ran from them to many other plant-filled tanks set at intervals down the corridor. "For oxygen," Marty said aloud in an almost calm voice, and was startled at the sound in his helmet. His helmet airspeaker was not turned on, so of course the old man did not hear him. The old man pulled a red berry from one of the plants and ate it absently.
Marty made a move with his chin to turn on his speaker, but did not complete. He half lifted his arms to wave, but fear of the not-understood held him, made him back up slowly into the shadows at the rear of the gallery. Turning his head to the right he could see the near end of the corridor, and an anchor there, not sunken in space but raised almost out of the forcefield on a framework at the end of the strip.
Near the stair he had ascended was a half-open door, leading into darkness. Marty realized he had turned off his suit lights without consciously knowing of it. Moving carefully so the old man would not see, he lit one and probed the darkness beyond the door cautiously. The room he entered was the first of a small suite that had once been a passenger cabin. The furniture was simple, but it was the first of any kind that he had seen aboard X. Garments hanging in one comer were similar to the old man's tunic, though no two were exactly alike in design. Marty fingered the fabric with one armored hand, holding it close to his faceplate. He nodded to himself; it seemed to be the kind of stuff produced by fiberrecycling machinery, and he doubted very much that it was anywhere near two thousand years old.
Marty emerged from the doorway of the little apartment, and stood in shadow with his suit lights out, looking around. The old man had disappeared. He remembered that the old man had gazed down the infinite-looking corridor as if expecting something. There was nothing new in sight that way. He turned up the gain of one of his suit mikes and focused it in that direction.
Many human voices were singing, somewhere down there, miles away. He started, and tried to interpret what he heard in some other way, but with an eerie thrill, he became convinced that his first impression was correct. While he studied a plan of going back to his bike and heading in that direction, he became aware that the singing was getting louder—and therefore, no doubt closer.
He leaned back against the bulkhead in the shadow at the rear of the gallery. His suit, dark-colored for space work far from Sol, would be practically invisible from the lighted corridor below, while he could see down with little difficulty. Part of his mind urged him to go back to Laura, to call the navy, because these unknown people could be dangerous to him. But he had to wait and see more of them. He grinned wryly as he realized that he was not going to get any salvage out of X after all.
Sweating in spite of his suit's coolers, he listened to the singing grow rapidly louder in his helmet. Male and female voices rose and fell in an intricate melody, sometimes blending, sometimes chanting separate parts. The language was unknown to him. Suddenly the people were in sight, first only as a faint dot of color in the distance. As they drew nearer he could see that they walked in a long neat column eight abreast, four on each side of the central strip of forcefield. Men and women, apparently teamed according to no fixed rule of age or sex or size—except that he saw no oldsters or young children.
The people sang and leaned forward as they walked, pulling their weight on heavy ropes that were intricately decorated, l
ike their clothing and that of the old man who had now stepped out of his doorway again to greet them. A few other oldsters of both sexes appeared near him to stand and wait. Through a briefly opened door Marty caught a glimpse of a well-lighted room holding machines he recognized as looms only because of the halffinished cloth they held. He shook his head wonderingly.
All at once the walkers were very near; hundreds of people pulling on ropes that led to a multiple whiffletree, made of twisted metal pipes, that rode over the central trench. The whiffletree and the space anchor to which it was fastened were pulled past Marty—or rather the spot from which he watched was carried past the fixed anchor by the slow, human-powered thrust of X toward Sol.
Behind the anchor came a small group of children, from about the age of ten up to puberty. They pulled on ropes, drawing a cart that held what looked like containers for food and water. At the extreme rear of the procession marched a man in the prime of life, tall and athletic, wearing a magnificent headdress.
About the time he drew even with Marty, this man stopped suddenly and uttered a sharp command. Instantly, the pulling and singing ceased. Several men nearest the whiffletree moved in and loosened it from the anchor with quick precision. Others held the slackened ropes clear as the enormous inertia of X's mass carried the end of the forcefield strip toward the anchor, which now jammed against the framework holding anchor number two, forcing the framework back where there had seemed to be no room. A thick forcefield pad now became visible to Marty behind the framework, expanding steadily as it absorbed the energy of the powerful stress between ship and anchor. Conduits of some kind, Marty saw, led away from the pad, possibly to where energy might be stored for use when it came time to start X creeping toward the sun again. A woman in a headdress now mounted the framework and released anchor number two, to drop into space "below" the hull and bind X fast to the place where it was now held by anchor number one. A crew of men came forward and began to raise anchor number one . . .
He found himself descending the stair, retracing his steps to the airlock. Behind him the voices of the people were raised in a steady recitation that might have been a prayer. Feeling somewhat as if he moved in a dream, he made no particular attempt at caution, but he met no one. He tried to think, to understand what he had witnessed. Vaguely, comprehension came.
Outside, he said: "I'm out all right, Laura. I want to look at something at the other end, and then I'll come home." He scarcely heard what she said in reply, but realized that her answer had been almost instantaneous; she must have been listening steadily for his call all the time. He felt better.
The bike shot him 50 kilometers down the dreamlike length of X toward Sol in a few minutes. A lot faster than the people inside do their traveling, he thought . . . and Sol was dim ahead.
Almost recklessly he broke into X again, through an airlock near the prow. At this end of the forcefield strip hung a gigantic block and tackle that would give a vast mechanical advantage to a few hundred people pulling against an anchor, when it came time for them to start the massive hull moving toward Sol once more.
He looked in almost unnoticed at a nursery, small children in the care of a few women. He thought one of the babies saw him and laughed at him as he watched through a hole in a bulkhead where a conduit had once passed.
"What is it?" asked Laura impatiently as he stepped exhausted out of the shower room aboard the Clem, wrapping a robe around him. He could see his shock suddenly mirrored in her face.
"People," he said, sitting down. "Alive over there. Earth people. Humans."
"You're all right?"
"Sure. It's just—God!" He told her about it briefly. "They must be descended from the survivors of the accident, whatever it was. Physically, there's no reason why they couldn't live when you come to think of it—even reproduce, up to a limited number. Plants for oxygen—I bet their air's as good as ours. Recycling equipment for food and water, and the hydrogen power lamp still working to run it, and to give them light and gravity . . . they have about everything they need. Everything but a space-drive." He leaned back with a sigh and closed his eyes. It was hard for him to stop talking to her. She was silent for a little, trying to assimilate it all. "But if they have hydrogen power, couldn't they have rigged something?" she finally asked. "Some kind of a drive, even if it was slow? Just one push and they'd keep moving."
Marty thought it over. "Moving a little faster won't help them." He sat up and opened his eyes again. "And they'd have a lot less work to do every day. I imagine too large a dose of leisure time could be fatal to all of them.
"Somehow they had the will to keep going, and the intelligence to find a way—to evolve a system of life that worked for them, that kept them from going wild and killing each other. And their children, and their grandchildren, and after that . . . " Slowly he stood up. She followed him into the control room, where they stood watching the image of X that was still focused on the telescope screen.
"All those years," Laura whispered. "All that time."
"Do you realize what they're doing?" he asked softly. "They're not just surviving, turned inward on weaving and designing and music.
"In a few hours they're going to get up and start another day's work. They're going to pull anchor number one back to the front of their ship and lower it. That's their morning job. Then someone left in the rear will raise anchor number two. Then the main group will start pulling against number one, as I saw them doing a little while ago, and their ship will begin to move toward Sol. Every day they go through this they move about fifty kilometers closer to home.
"Honey, these people are walking home and pulling their ship with them. It must be a religion with them by now, or something very near it . . . " He put an arm around Laura.
"Marty—how long would it take them?"
"Space is big," he said in a flat voice, as if quoting something he had been required to memorize.
After a few moments he continued. "I said just moving a little faster won't help them. Let's say they've traveled 50 kilometers a day for two thousand years. That's somewhere near 36 million kilometers. Almost enough to get from Mars to Earth at their nearest approach. But they've got a long way to go to reach the neighborhood of Mars' orbit. We're well out beyond Pluto here. Practically speaking, they're just about where they started from." He smiled wanly. "Really, they're not far from home, for an interstellar ship. They had their accident almost on the doorstep of their own solar system, and they've been walking toward the threshold ever since."
Laura went to the communicator and began to set it up for the call that would bring the navy within a few hours. She paused.
"How long would it take them now," she asked, "to get somewhere near Earth?"
"Hell would freeze over. But they can't know that anymore. Or maybe they still know it and it just doesn't bother them. They must just go on, tugging at that damned anchor day after day, year after year, with maybe a holiday now and then . . . I don't know how they do it. They work and sing and feel they're accomplishing something . . . and really, they are, you know. They have a goal and they are moving toward it. I wonder what they say of Earth, how they think about it?"
Slowly Laura continued to set up the communicator.
Marty watched her. "Are you sure?" he pleaded suddenly.
"What are we doing to them?"
But she had already sent the call.
For better or worse, the long voyage was almost over.
Volume Paa-Pyx
When he was alone in his office with the prisoner, the director said: "Now, what is this secret you can reveal to my ears alone?"
"Are you sure none of them are listening?" The prisoner was a young man with seedy clothing and an odd haircut. As he spoke, he managed to grin in a conspiratorial way, as if he already shared some vital and amusing secret with director Ahlgren.
And this is about the average of the Underground, thought the director, studying his victim with distaste. And in the next room Barbara waited her tur
n at being interrogated. How could she have ever become connected, however indirectly, with the ideals or the people of this Underground represented before him?
"None of them are listening," said the director, who took daily steps to discourage that sort of thing among his subordinates. It was not entirely unheard of for a Party member to turn traitor and join the Underground. "Quickly now, what have you to tell me?"
"This—I will act as a double agent for you," volunteered the young wretch, in a stage whisper, maintaining the idiotic grin. His voluntary muscles were still mainly paralyzed from the stun pistols of the Political Police, and so he sat propped erect in his chair by a stiff pillow the director kept handy for such use.
Director Ahlgren frowned thoughtfully. He took a cigarette from a box on his plain but highly polished desk. "Care for one?"
"No, no. Do you understand what I am offering you? I am a highly trained agent, and I will betray them all to you, because you are the strongest here, and I must serve the strongest." The young man nodded earnestly, as if he hoped the director would imitate the movement and so agree with him.
The director puffed smoke. "Very well, I accept. Now you must show me that you will really do what you say. Tell me the address of your contact cell."
The young rebel contorted his forehead, in an apparent effort to conceive a stroke of Machiavellian strategy.
Ahlgren pursued him. "I know each cell of the Underground has its contact with the rest of the organization through one other cell and that you know the address of yours. How can I trust you as a double agent if you won't tell me that much?"
Of Berserkers, Swords and Vampires Page 3
