A. E. Van Vogt - Novel 18 - Mission to the Stars

by Mission to the Stars

  The woman seemed not to have heard. She frowned and said: “How is it that we’ve never heard a Fifty Suns broadcast? I intended to ask about that before. Not once during our ten years in the Cloud did we catch so much as a whisper of radio energy.”

  Maltby shrugged. “All radios operate on an extremely complicated variable wave length—changes every twentieth of a second. Your instruments would register a tick once every ten minutes, and—”

  He was cut off by a voice from the astroplate. A man’s face was there—Acting Grand Captain Rutgers.

  “Oh there you are captain,” the woman said. “What kept you?”

  “We’re in the process of landing our forces on Cassidor VII,” was the reply. “As you know, regulations require that the grand captain—”

  “Oh yes. Are you free now?”

  “No. I’ve taken a moment to see that everything is right with you, and then I’ll switch you over to Captain Planston.”

  “How is the landing proceeding?”

  “Perfectly. We have made contact with the government. They seem resigned. But now I must leave. Good-by, my lady.”j

  His face flickered and was gone. The plate went blank. It was about as curt a greeting as anybody had ever received. But Maltby, sunk in his own gloom, scarcely noticed.

  So it was all over. The desperate scheming of the Fifty Suns leaders, his own attempt to destroy the great battleship, proved futile against an invincible foe. For a moment he felt very close to the defeat, with all its implications. Consciousness came finally that the fight no longer mattered in his life. But the knowledge failed to shake his dark mood.

  He saw that the Right Honorable Gloria Cecily had an expression of mixed elation and annoyance on her fine, strong face; and there was no doubt that she didn’t feel— disconnected—from the mighty events out there in space. Nor had she missed the implications of the abruptness of the interview.

  The astroplate grew bright again and a face appeared on it—one that Maltby hadn’t seen before. It was a heavy-jowled oldish man with a ponderous voice that said: “Privilege, your ladyship—hope we can find something that will enable us to make a rescue. Never give up hope, I say, until the last nail’s driven in your coffin.”

  He chuckled; and the woman said: “Captain Maltby will give you all the information he has, then no doubt you can give him some advice, Captain Planston. Neither he nor I, unfortunately, are astrophysicists.”

  “Can’t be experts on every subject,” Captain Planston puffed. “Er, Captain Maltby, what do you know?” Maltby gave him his information briefly, then waited while the other gave instructions. There wasn’t much: “Find out length of seasons. Interested in that yellow effect of the sunlight and the deep brown. Take the following photographs, using ortho-sensitive film—use three dyes, a red sensitive, a blue and a yellow. Take a spectrum reading—what I want to check on is that maybe you’ve got a strong blue sun there, with the ultraviolet barred by the heavy atmosphere, and all the heat and light coming in on the yellow band. I’m not offering much hope, mind you—the Greater Cloud is packed with blue suns—five hundred thousand of them brighter than Sirius.

  “Finally, get that season information from the natives. Make a point of it. Good-by!”

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  THE native was wary. He persisted in retreating elusively into the jungle; and his four legs gave him a speed advantage of which he seemed to be aware. For he kept coming back, tantalizingly. The woman watched with amusement, then exasperation.

  “Perhaps,” she suggested, “if we separated, and I drove him toward you?”

  She saw the frown on his face as Maltby nodded reluctantly. His voice was strong, tense. “He’s leading us into an ambush. Turn on the sensitives in your helmet and carry your gun. Don’t be too hasty about firing, but don’t hesitate in a crisis. A spear can make an ugly wound; and we haven’t got the best facilities for handling anything like that.”

  His orders caused her momentary irritation. He seemed not to be aware that she was as conscious as he of the requirements of the situation. The Right Honorable Gloria sighed. If they had to stay on this planet, there would have to be some major psychological adjustments, and not—she thought grimly—only by herself.

  “Now!” said Maltby beside her, swiftly. “Notice the way the ravine splits in two. I came this far yesterday and they join about two hundred yards farther on. He’s gone up the left fork, I’ll take the right. You stop here, let him come back to see what’s happened, then drive him on.” Maltby was gone, like a shadow, along a dark path that wound under thick foliage. Silence settled.

  She waited. After a minute she felt herself alone in a yellow and black world that had been lifeless since time began. She thought: This was what Maltby meant yesterday when he’d said she wouldn’t dare shoot him—and remain alone. It hadn’t penetrated then. It did now. Alone, on a nameless planet of a mediocre sun, one woman waking up every morning on a moldering ship that rested its unliving metal shape on a dark, muggy, yellow marsh land.

  She stood somber. There was no doubt that the problem of Dellian and Mixed Man, and human being would have to be solved here as well as out there.

  A sound pulled her out of her gloom. As she watched, abruptly more alert, a catlike head peered cautiously from a line of bushes a hundred yards away across the clearing. It was an interesting head. Its ferocity was not the least of its fascinating qualities. The yellowish body was invisible now in the underbrush, but she had caught enough glimpses of it earlier to recognize that it was the CC type, of the almost universal Centaur family. Its body was evenly balanced between its hind and forelegs.

  It watched her and its great glistening black eyes were round with puzzlement. Its head twisted from side to side, obviously searching for Maltby. She waved her gun and walked forward. Instantly the creature disappeared. She could hear it with her sensitives, running into distance. Abruptly it slowed; then there was no sound at all.

  “He’s got it,” she thought.

  She felt impressed. These two-brained Mixed Men, she thought, were bold and capable. It would really be too bad if prejudice prevented them from being absorbed into the galactic civilization of Imperial Earth. She watched him a few minutes later, using the block system of communication with the creature. Maltby looked up, saw her. He shook his head as if puzzled.

  “He says it’s always been warm like this, and that he’s been alive for thirteen hundred moons. And that a moon is forty suns—forty days. He wants us to come up a little further along this valley, but that’s too transparent for comfort. Our move is to make a cautious friendly gesture, and—”

  He stopped short. Before she could even realize anything was wrong, her mind was caught, her muscles galvanized. She was thrown sideways and downward so fast that the blow of striking the ground was pure agony.

  She lay there stunned, and out of the comer of her eye she saw the spear plunge through the air where she had been. She twisted, rolled over-her own free will now— and jerked her gun in the direction from which the spear had come. There was a second centaur there, racing away along a bare slope. Her finger pressed on the control; and then—

  “Don’t!” It was Maltby, his voice low: “It was a scout the others sent ahead to see what was happening. He’s done his work. It’s all over.”

  She lowered her gun and saw with annoyance that her hand was shaking, her whole body trembling. She parted her lips to say: “Thanks for saving my life!” Then she closed them again. Because the words would have quavered. And because— Saved her life! Her mind poised on the edge of blankness with the shock of the thought. Incredibly she had never before been in personal danger from an individual creature. There had been the time when her battleship had run into the outer fringes of a sun; and there was the cataclysm of the storm just past. But these had been impersonal menaces to be met with technical virtuosities and the hard training of the service. This was different.

  All the way back to the segme
nt of the ship she tried to fathom what the difference meant. It seemed to her finally that she had it.

  “Spectrum featureless.” Maltby gave his findings over the astro. “No dark lines at all; two of the yellow bands so intense that they hurt my eyes. As you suggested, apparently what we have here is a blue sun whose strong violet radiation is cut off by the atmosphere.

  “However,” he finished, “the uniqueness of that effect is confined to our planet here, a derivation of the thick atmosphere. Any questions?”

  “No-o!” The astrophysicist looked thoughtful. “And I can give you no further instructions. I’ll have to examine this material. Will you ask Lady Laurr to come in? I’d like to speak to her privately if you please.”

  “Of course.”

  When she had come, Maltby went outside and watched the moon come up. Darkness—he had noticed it the previous night—brought a vague, overall violet haze. Explained now!

  An eighty-degree temperature on a planet that, the angular diameter of the sun being what it was, would have been minus one hundred eighty degrees, if the sun’s apparent color had been real. A blue sun, one of the five hundred thousand— Interesting but— Maltby smiled savagely. Captain Planston’s “No further instructions!” had a finality about it that—

  He shivered involuntarily. And after a moment tried to picture himself sitting like this, a year hence, staring up at an unchanged moon. Ten years, twenty—

  He grew aware that the woman had come to the doorway and was gazing at him where he sat on the chair. He looked up. The stream of white light from inside the ship caught the queer expression on her face, gave her a strange bleached look after the yellowness that had seemed a part of her complexion all day.

  “We shall receive no more astro-radio calls,” she said and, turning, went inside.

  Maltby nodded to himself, almost idly. It was hard and brutal, this abrupt cutting off of communication. But the regulations governing such situations were precise. The marooned ones must realize with utter clarity without false hopes and without curious illusions produced by radio communications, that they were cut off forever. Forever on their own.

  Well, so be it. A fact was a fact, to be faced with resolution. There had been a chapter on castaways in one of the books he had read on the battleship. It had stated that nine hundred million human beings had, during recorded history, been marooned on then undiscovered planets. Most of these planets had eventually been found; and on no less than ten thousand of them, great populations had sprung up from the original nucleus of castaways. The law prescribed that a castaway could not withhold himself or herself from participating in such population increases—regardless of previous rank. Castaways must forget considerations of sensitivity and individualism, and think of themselves as instruments of race expansion. There were penalties; naturally inapplicable if no rescue was effected, but ruthlessly applied whenever recalcitrants were found.

  Conceivably the courts might determine that a human being and a—well—robot constituted a special case. Half an hour must have passed while he sat there. He stood up finally, conscious of hunger. He had forgotten all about supper. He felt a qualm of self-annoyance. Damn it, this was not the night to appear to be putting pressure on her. Sooner or later she would have to be convinced that she ought to do her share of the cooking.

  But not tonight.

  He hurried inside, toward the compact kitchen that was part of every segment of the ship. In the corridor, he paused. A blaze of light streamed from the kitchen door. Somebody was whistling softly and tunelessly but cheerfully; and there was an odor of cooking vegetables, and hot lak meat.

  They almost bumped in the doorway. “I was just going to call you,” she said.

  The meal was silent and quickly over. They put the dishes into the automatic and went and sat in the great lounge. Maltby saw finally that the woman was studying him with amused eyes.

  “Is there any possibility,” she said abruptly, “that a Mixed Man and a human woman can have children?”

  “Frankly,” Maltby confessed, “I doubt it.”

  He launched into a description of the cold and pressure process that had molded the protoplasm to make the original Mixed Men. When he finished he saw that her eyes were still regarding him with a faint amusement. She said in an odd tone: “A very curious thing happened to me today, after that native threw his spear. I realized,” she seemed for a moment to have difficulty in speaking— “I realized that I had, so far as I was personally concerned, solved the robot problem. Naturally,” she finished quietly, “I would not have withheld myself in any event. But it is pleasant to know that I like you without”—she smiled—“qualifications.”

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  BLUE sun that looked yellow. Maltby sat in a chair the following morning puzzling over it. He half expected a visit from the natives, and so he was determined to stay near the ship that day. He kept his eyes aware of the clearing edges, the valley rims, the jungle trails, but— There was a law, he remembered, that governed the shifting of light to other wave bands, to yellow for instance. Rather complicated, but in view of the fact that all instruments of the main bridge were controls of instruments, not the machines themselves, he’d have to depend on mathematics if he ever hoped to visualize the kind of sun that was out there. Most of the heat probably came through the ultraviolet range. But that was uncheckable. So leave it alone and stick to the yellow.

  He went into the ship. Gloria was nowhere in sight, but her bedroom door was closed. He found a notebook, returned to his chair and began to figure. An hour later he stared at the answer: One million three hundred thousand million miles. About a fifth of a light year. He laughed curtly. That was that. He’d have to get better data than he had or—

  Or would he?

  His mind poised. In a single flash of understanding, the stupendous truth burst upon him. With a cry he leaped to his feet. He was whirling to race through the door as a long, black shadow slid across him. The shadow was so vast, instantly darkening the whole valley, that involuntarily, Maltby halted, and looked up.

  The battleship Star Cluster hung low over the yellow-brown jungle planet, already disgorging a lifeboat that glinted a yellowish silver as it circled out into the sunlight, and started down. Maltby had only a moment with the woman before the lifeboat landed. “To think,” he said, “that I just now figured out the truth.”

  She was, he saw, not looking at him. Her gaze seemed far away. He went on: “As for the rest, the best method, I imagine, is to put me in the conditioning chamber, and-”

  Still without looking at him, she cut him off: “Don’t be ridiculous. You must not imagine that I feel embarrassed because you have kissed me. I shall receive you in my quarters later.”

  A bath, new clothes—at last Maltby stepped through the transmitter into the astrophysics department. His own first realization of the tremendous truth, while generally accurate, had lacked detailed facts.

  “Ah, Maltby!” The chief of the department came forward and shook hands. “Some sun you picked there—we suspected from your first description of the yellowness and the black. But naturally we couldn’t rouse your hopes— Forbidden, you know. The axial tilt, the apparent length of a summer in which jungle trees of great size showed no growth rings—very suggestive. The featureless spectrum with its complete lack of dark lines—almost conclusive. Final proof was that the ortho-sensitive film was overexposed, while the blue and red sensitives were badly underexposed. This star-type is so immensely hot that practically all of its energy radiation is far in the ultravisible. A secondary radiation—a sort of fluorescence in the star’s own atmosphere—produces the visible yellow when a minute fraction of the appalling ultraviolet radiation is transformed into longer wave lengths by helium atoms. A fluorescent lamp, in a fashion—but on a scale that is more than ordinarily cosmic in its violence. The total radiation reaching the planet was naturally tremendous; the surface radiation, after passing through miles of absorbing ozone, water
vapor, carbon dioxide and other gases, was very different. No wonder the native said it has always been hot. The summer lasts four thousand years. The normal radiation of that appalling star type— the aeon-in-aeon-out radiation rate—is about equal to a full-fledged Nova at its catastrophic maximum of violence. It has a period of a few hours, and is equivalent to approximately a hundred million ordinary suns. Nova O, we call that brightest of all stars; and there’s only one in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, the great and glorious S Doradus. When I asked you to call Grand Captain Laurr, and I told her that out of a hundred million suns she had picked—”

  It was at that point that Maltby cut him off: “Just a minute,” he said, “did you say you told Lady Laurr last night?”

  “Was it night down there?” Captain Planston was interested. “Well, well— By the way, I almost forgot—this marrying and giving in marriage is not so important to me now that I am an old man. But congratulations.”

  The conversation was too swift for Maltby. His minds were still examining the first statement. That she had known all the time. He came up, groping, before the new words. “Congratulations?” he echoed.

  “Definitely time she had a husband,” boomed the captain. “She’s been a career woman, you know. Besides, it’ll have a revivifying effect on other robots . . . pardon me. Assure you, the name means nothing to me. Anyway, Lady Laurr herself made the announcement a few minutes ago, so come down and see me again.” He turned away with a wave of a thick hand.

  Maltby headed for the nearest transmitter. She would probably be expecting him by now.

  She would not be disappointed.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  THE globe was palely luminous, and about three feet in diameter. It hung in the air at approximately the center of the room, and its lowest arc was at the level of Maltby’s chin. Frowning, his double mind tensed, he climbed out of the bed, put on his slippers, and walked slowly around the light-shape. As he stepped past it, it vanished.