It would have been easier if he could have viewed the entire sky, but he had to be content with one hemisphere. If he could find an undistorted constellation with a few stars missing he had come in that direction and, conversely, if there were stars added, he had gone away from it past some of the stars between Sol and this enemy system.
He tried to recall visits to the big stellartarium in New York where the lecturer displayed the skies as seen from various well known stars that were within half a hundred light years of Sol. Certain sky-marks and their displacement would be very helpful, if he could remember them. But he found that he had not been as visually attentive as he might have been, or that he had seen and been entertained and then discarded the data as interesting but useless in a scientific culture that firmly believed in the limiting velocity of light. Finally he gave up hoping to establish his whereabouts by visual inspection. He found a small pad of paper and began to make layouts of the familiar constellations as he saw them. Someone among the planets of Sol would be able to measure the angles and changes and come up with the right answer within a few light years, and stars were sufficiently separated so that the chances were good for a reasonable identification.
He put a dozen small pages in his pocket and then took his first look at the control room. He could see nothing changed at first, but then he found a small auxiliary panel beside the pilot’s seat which contained a bar-topped toggle switch and three pilot lamps that were different in appearance from the rest of the Lancaster’s standard equipment He felt an urge to try the toggle, but fought it down. It was too much like playing with toy building blocks made of sub-critical masses of plutonium, and Farradyne wanted to stay alive long enough to watch the downfall of the enemy, not participate in the explosion. Curbing his human curiosity to fiddle with strange gadgets, Farradyne turned away from the board and went to the cupboard where he took out his binoculars.
He was astonished to find out how far away the star-ship really was, and how big it was when it leaped into closer view in the glasses. It was still as dark as an untenanted building except for that one lighted porthole, but the angle into the cabin beyond was too steep. Farradyne could see nothing more than the corner between the opposite wall and the ceiling. He toyed with the idea of trying to lift himself to the top of the dome, but gave it up because he realized, once he removed the binoculars from his eyes, that the additional few feet of height would not change the distant angle enough to make it worth his while.
The question of what to do next perplexed him. Obviously there was no answer. There could be no plan. He would have to play it by ear again, with the other guy calling the moves. He grunted unhappily; he could not even smoke because he feared to show even the smallest light. But—
Farradyne went down to his galley and opened a can of mixed space rations which he shovelled in cold. It filled him adequately but not tastily and he realized that the best of fine food would have been stowed away in a frenzy of nervous listening for the inevitable sounds of the enemy’s return. With haste, Farradyne cleaned up the evidence of his presence, thinking how ridiculous it was to be stealing from his own spacecraft He was finishing up this job when the faint glint of a distant flash of light caught his eye. He hurried to the porthole from which the glint had come, and peered out. A large caravan of heavy trucks was snaking around the corner of a distant building and turning onto the spacefield. Their headlamps cut forward like scythes of light, cutting a brilliant path toward the Lancaster.
Farradyne did not deem it wise to sit this out. They might have been heading for the other side of the field, but if they weren’t he was trapped. He went aloft to the salon and scuttered down the landing ramp, around the back side of the poised spacer and away from the direction of the trucks, running in the shadow cast by the Lancaster. Five or six hundred yards away was another spacer, and it was completely dark. Farradyne scurried around the widespread tail fins of the monster and stood there, peering at the caravan from between the angle made by the tail fin and the incurving body of the spacecraft.
The trucks came around the Lancaster, surrounded it in a circle, and then a blaze of lights came, lighting the Terran ship from dome to reaction funnel. Ladders Were sent aloft and a huge crane lifted. The calls of workers and the directions of their superintendent came to Farradyne clearly. He wondered what they were doing and saying; except for the three-toned voices that added an audible complement of women and children to the gang, it sounded like any work party on earth yammering in a strange tongue.
He watched for an hour, and then he saw that the distant sky was beginning to show a very faint glow of gray. Sunrise —or perhaps a false sunrise, he could not tell.
He scuttled like a human spider away from the direction of the work party until its flood lights were a distant miniature stage setting. He wound in and among silent, dark spacecraft avoiding those with lights even though he had to detour wide for the sake of this safety. Eventually he came to the far side of the spaceport He cased the place warily from behind the fin of a spacer, looking at the dark, silent buildings and wondering if this gang of aliens had ever heard of night watchmen. He did not trust the quiet darkness of the apparently uninhabited spaceport because he was suspicious and he knew that other people were as suspicious as he was. He was glad that he did not barge in brashly, for along about the first glimmers of real graying sky, a man came out from between two of the buildings waving a searchlight. He sauntered along in front of the nearest building and disappeared between it and the next.
Farradyne skipped across the space and went into the gangway the watchman had just come out of. He walked warily through and came to a high wire fence. Keeping to the building side of the clearance-way between fence and building, Farradyne skulked along in the direction opposite to that taken by the watchman.
He needed a minimum of two items: A set of Planet X clothing and a way out of this rattrap.
He found the way out a few minutes later.
A dim striking of a bell alarmed him until he realized that it was tolling, rather than clamoring an alarm. He followed the tolling for seventeen bongs and came upon a small sentry house perched beside an open gate. As the tolling stopped, the man in the house stretched, yawned and got up, picking up a searchlight. He stepped outside and looked around in a bored manner.
The watchman took one look at the open gate some ten feet from his position and shrugged. He turned his back on it and disappeared between a couple of buildings not far from Farradyne’s place.
Farradyne grinned. Obviously it had been so long ago since any trouble had been this way that the guard-system had become lax. Farradyne praised laziness and complacency highly as he sped across the open space on silent feet and passed the gate on his way to the outside.
Dawn was breaking and the chill of the morning nipped at him. He had broken free, but it was just as dangerous for him to remain in front of the open gate as it might have been for him to be roaming around the spaceport in the full light of day. He turned to the right and started to walk along the road toward a group of small buildings a few hundred yards from the spaceport.
The second item Farradyne needed came later. He had sauntered along several deserted streets in the gray of dawn and down a couple of alleys and through a vacant lot or two until he was quite some distance from the spaceport. Here, in a dimly lighted district Farradyne met his Planet X clothing.
The stranger did not have a chance. He had been drinking or sniffing whatever the enemy used for celebration and he had used too much. Farradyne’s hard fist came out of somewhere and the stranger went down like a log, silently. Farradyne dragged him into an alley and stripped him to the skin.
His own clothing Farradyne stuffed in a trash barrel, pushing the bundle down below the rest of the rubbish in the hope that the barrel would be collected by a couple of hard-working and uncurious men who would never note the alien cut to the cloth.
He left the fellow naked to suffer both a hangover and a lot of embarrassment.
Then in the pleasantly bright dawn, Farradyne walked boldly down the city street jingling a bunch of native coins in the side pocket of his costume and feeling just a trifle silly, like an introvert at a fancy-dress ball. The trousers were striped gaudily and the loose jacket hugged his waist a bit on the too-tight side. There was a widish hat and a pair of shoes that could have been put on either foot. He looked like a character out of an old-time musical comedy and he hoped that his costume was not the kind worn by Planet X-ians as formal evening wear because then he would look silly to them wandering around in the morning light like a man caught far from home at six ack-emma in a tuxedo.
Eventually he passed a shop window and saw other garb like the junk he was wearing and he felt better.
He had every faith in the belief that people are disciplined against striking up an acquaintance with a total stranger, and so he turned into what was obviously a main thoroughfare and strolled along it until the streets began to fill with people.
17
There was no doubt about the alien quality of the city. But in its functional qualities, it was very familiar. These, he realized, were developments that had been found to be effective over a long time of sheer operation; functions that would have been mechanically similar on any planet no matter how alien, so long as its inhabitants breathed air, ate food and perambulated. Buildings were mostly squarish blocks cut with windows and doors; shops had broad windows for displaying their wares and even the wares were not too exotic Clothing stores and gewgaw stores and food shops and now and then one that sold stuff that was not to be identified by a stranger.
The streets and alleys and gutters and sidewalks were normal. Traffic ran to the left, however, which gave Farradyne some trouble because he had been used to stepping from the curb and glancing to the right. Drivers squawked at him with their horns and swore at him in their multi-tongued voices. Farradyne forced himself to learn this left-handed traffic problem; he did not want to be handed a traffic ticket, nor did he want to be asked by some policeman for an explanation of his stupidity.
By now the sun was well above the horizon and the streets began to teem. The air began to sing with the noise of people chattering, greeting one another, and generally making a racket resembling a Chinese laundry in an air-raid. He heard the clash of metal on metal and turned to watch a couple of drivers arguing over their dented fenders. As he walked with his head turned, Farradyne bumped into someone and the man chittered something at him angrily. Farradyne nodded humbly and grunted under his breath and hurried on. So did the other man, who merely replied to Farradyne’s grunt with a single three-toned discord before veering off and away.
He had to be careful, he told himself; he had found this city so closely resembling a city of his own system that he had become careless. He knew by now that if he conducted himself without attracting attention and if he walked without cringing, no one would think to stop him for questioning.
What had Carolyn said? Something about their springing from the same basic stock some fifty thousand years ago? Well, anyway, these were of the same family of curious apes who were gregarious enough to band together and still individualistic enough to resent any intrusion upon privacy. There would most certainly be three-toned hell to pay if he opened his own trap, but so long as he kept it shut, they had no way of telling him from any of their own kind.
And so he walked among them for hours, until the crowd thinned and the traffic became less boisterous and frantic and the city settled down to the quieter routine.
Farradyne found it hard to place this cosmopolitan culture in the same niche with the society that appeared to be systematically undermining the Solarian civilization. It was quite similar to the paradox he had found in the Niles family. It was as though murder was an honorable enterprise and that the dope-sales were listed on the daily stock exchange under the commodities section.
Farradyne had expected to find some monstrous ugliness here. A police or slave state would not have surprised him; it was such a culture that usually fostered villainy. Instead he found a city much like his own and it was hard for Farradyne to shake off the feeling that the only misunderstanding between them was the age-old barrier of tongue.
Eventually he came upon an ornately carved building that stood with the doors open. People were sauntering in and out with no obvious barrier, and so Farradyne followed one group at a little distance and went into the building.
It could have been any museum on Terra, for the life-forms displayed were as bizarre as any of the stranger bits of art work on the earth or other of Sol’s planets. He came upon a quiet hallway that had a non-scale- model of the solar system; it was a working orrery that told Farradyne nothing other than that this system had eleven planets and a batch of satellites. None of the planets had rings like Saturn. He looked for something that could identify the parent sun for him, but he found nothing familiar about any of the displays, except one.
There was a small model of Sol and its planets on a pedestal, and while the sight was familiar, the lettering below the display was not. If the legend said anything about distance and direction, it was not only in the alien’s terms, but in the alien’s written language.
To find out where in the sky he was, Farradyne needed a fast course in Planet X-ian language, and then a six months’ concentrated course in uranography. He began to understand that the matter of being lost is only a dislocation of your own frame of reference. Cities do not have large signs around the streets saying “This is Chicago” because any man in his right senses knows that he is not in Detroit, and if he does not, there are better places for him than either city.
He shunned the opportunity of visiting the enemy planetarium. Having some lecturer explain the heavens as seen from Planet X in a trio-voice would get him nowhere.
He left the museum and began to trudge back toward the spaceport. He was hungry again, and the morning and early fore-afternoon had been frustrating, even though it had been enlightening to find that the aliens lived and breathed and enjoyed themselves like people instead of the cold inhuman monsters he had expected.
Again Farradyne watched his fellows carefully. It seemed that one medium slug would buy him a wad of paper that could be nothing other than the afternoon news, after which he would get two smaller slugs in change. He strode to the newsstand with a what-the-hell feeling and tossed down one of the medium slugs. He scooped up one of the papers and two of the smaller slugs and walked away without saying a word. The newsman watched the transaction without turning an eye. Then Farradyne folded the paper through the middle and tucked it under his arm and sauntered along like the absent-minded professor until he found a quick-grab joint that opened on the sidewalk.
He stood at the counter scanning the wall-menu as though he knew what it said until the waitress sounded off at him. He looked down at her with a frown of irritation, and then waved two fingers at a hot plate full of flat square things floating in an oily sea of juice. He unfolded his paper and immersed himself in a page while the waitress scooped two of the flat things from the plate and slid them between folds of something like a bun. She shoved them beneath the lower edge of Farradyne’s paper on a flat plate and stood there mewing at him like a trio of alley cats.
Acting in an absent manner Farradyne took two of the larger slugs from his pocket and dropped them on the bar. The waitress took one, deposited it in a register with a shrug, as if she had seen oddly absorbed characters before, and returned with three of the smaller slugs which she piled on the bar beside Farradyne’s remaining coin.
He munched his greasy God-knows-whats and while he mentally complained about the flavor and the greasiness, he was forced to admit that they were more satisfying than his earlier cold can of mixed space rations.
Then he folded his paper (wondering whether he had been absorbed in a lonely hearts column, the local stock market, or a nice lurid sex-slaying) and sauntered off toward the spaceport. He made it in easy steps, angling this way and that and wanderi
ng like Haroun al Raschid, but feeling more like that other fabled Arabian who was forced to remain in the body of a stork because his bird’s mouth could not pronounce the magic word in the proper language. No one paid him any attention.
The sum and substance of his adventure was the feeling that a hyena can walk through a monkey cage so long as the hyena has enough sense to wear monkey clothing and keep his big bazoo shut, and an opinion that it was a damned shame that such nice-appearing folks could be such lice.
By the time Farradyne returned to the vicinity of the spaceport it was getting along toward late afternoon. It was a long day on Planet X and if Farradyne’s judgment of time were anything worth mention, the day had still some hours to go until the real darkness came. He had no watch. A watch would have come in handy for time estimating even though there stood an excellent probability that the length of the day did not match anything like the Terran standard of time. He had dumped his wrist watch along with his own clothing because it was obviously alien; the watch he wore was his victim’s but it was calibrated in Planet X time and Farradyne had not had a chance to compare times, nor to sit quietly and observe the relative motions of the several hands around the dial.
He was too early, but he had no other place to go. He could see across the spaceport to the Lancaster, where the cranes still poised high and the work went on, but still he had no more urge to return to the city.
Farradyne observed the entry of others carefully, and discovered that there were a couple of smaller ships taking on passengers, and that a number of people were coming along to watch them off. It looked like the operations on the average civilian spaceport, where people were not herded around nor treated with suspicion. It caused Farradyne to think that obviously the people of Planet X were all in accord on the plans of their undercover attack on Sol. Farradyne smiled sourly, on the planets of Sol any such venture would have been greeted with every shade of reaction from eager applause to outright hostility.
Hellflower (1957) Page 14
