The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  Fakhuri's image switched its viewscreen to pick up the radar image when the bouncing pulses brought it back. The seconds of unavoidable distance delay crept by.

  "Can't pick up any flash of impact optically, sir. Maybe he hasn't era—"

  The echo came. Fakhuri's screen showed only electronic hash for a moment. Then the radar computer gave up its search for a small moving target, and dispassionately showed the waiting humans exactly what it saw, the problem it was having to contend with.

  Some watcher on Fakhuri's ship cried out: "Captain!"

  The radar picture electronically frozen on Fakhuri's screen held him—and now Adam—frozen in disbelief. Not the expected rough semblance of the Earthlike planet shown by the optical scopes. Nothing like that—here instead was a bright spheroid, looking smooth and opaque as a steel ball, more than a thousand kilometers greater in diameter than the planet it shrouded.

  Fakhuri quickly switched his screen back to present the image brought in by the optical telescopes. Planet Four still reflected the radiation of her own sun as naturally as Earth reflected that of hers—again Four appeared innocent and friendly in her bright aura of oxygen atmosphere, plain and ordinary behind a tattered white film of clouds where her spherical shape curved closest to the Marco.

  "Evasive action!" Fakhuri ordered. "Around the planet!" If this world was shielded from radar, it might well be armed in other unimaginable ways as well. Anything might be about to come up from it.

  The brutal acceleration of evasive action was evidently too much for the Marco's artificial gravity, for Fakhuri's chair now folded itself protectively around its occupant. The chair also put forth to the control panel a pair of artificial arms, slaved to the captain's motor-nerve impulses.

  "Passive detection still blank screen, sir." That meant that the Marco's instruments could detect no artificially produced radiation from the planet.

  "We lost him in the surface clouds, before we moved," said an astronomer's shaken voice. "Never got any indication of an impact where he went down."

  "Radar gear checks okay, captain, I don't know what—"

  "Pulse again, then! give me the whole planet again."

  The Marco was over nightside now. The planet showed in the optical scopes as a vague dark bulk, embraced by a thin bright crescent. Then that image was gone, as Fakhuri switched his screen to receive the radar image again. The pulses would be hurtling down again toward the planet… down… down… back… back…

  The marvelous thing flashed from the screen again, electrically beautiful. The only difference on this side of the planet was at the point antipodal to that where the scoutship had disappeared. Here, the radar-outlined, metallic-looking, optically invisible surface curved steeply down to meet the planet's land surface, in an amplexicaul depression, like the dimple around the stem of an apple. Fakhuri sat staring at it, as if the wonder of it was stronger than alarm, for him.

  But there were standing orders for exploration captains. Any technologically advanced strangers encountered were to be treated with the utmost caution. One starship could carry a weapon capable of destroying a planet in minutes. There was of course a chance that the scoutship pilot might still be alive; but one of the Fakhuri's mechanical slave-hands was already moving, slamming down on a stud marked EMERGENCY FLIGHT.

  The flight had been toward Antares, not Earth; no possible trail must be left toward home.

  The holostage in Grodsky's inner office went blank momentarily. Then the General said: "This is the planeteer who was lost, Mann. Colonel Brazil knew him."

  On the stage there appeared the figure of a heavily-built, cheerful-looking man. It was a picture made outdoors somewhere that showed its subject, walking quickly, wearing a planeteer's groundsuit, carrying his helmet under one arm.

  "Alexander Golden, Chief Planeteer," said General Grodsky. His tone was oddly formal, as if he might be wondering what the name and title ultimately meant.

  The secretary, who had re-entered the office a few moments earlier carrying some papers, had paused to watch, and now had a question. "Did he leave a family?" she asked, gazing into the stage.

  "No." Grodsky rubbed his eyes. "As I recall from his records, he grew up in some institution—like you, Mann. Never married. Very able spaceman."

  "And an able planeteer," put in Colonel Brazil. After a moment he added: "Another happy bachelor bit the dust. Not many of us left. I guess I met him two or three times."

  Adam was staring at the last frozen frame of Alexander Golden on the little stage. Something about it was bothering him. "I… think I might have met him, somewhere." But the vague sense of recognition eluded Adam and vanished when he tried to pin it down. He shrugged.

  As the holostage dimmed down completely and the lights in the room came up to normal, Boris shifted around on his desk-top perch to face the General. "Well, boss, what do we do?"

  "We go back there," said Grodsky, swiveling his chair back to face his desk, and the two visitors in his office. The General's face was lined and tight-looking. Obviously Fakhuri's discovery was in his lap. The situation could not be managed from the distance of Earth, not when it took forty days by courier ship for a message to be sent and answered. No Earth government would be foolish enough to send more than broad instructions to Antares base, and in this case there was little doubt of what those instructions were going to say.

  "Now," said Grodsky, getting down to business. "That forcefield, or whatever it is, around that planet—let's start calling it planet Golden—the field around planet Golden seems to me a flat impossibility. Consider:

  "First, it almost entirely envelops an Earth-sized world. Second, the passive detection crew on the Marco were able to pick up no trace of it. Third, it allowed a scoutship to enter, but only as a falling object. It cut off the scout's engines, its radio, and possibly everything else aboard.

  "Gentlemen, we've nothing like that, anywhere!"

  After a little silence, Brazil spoke up, casually. "Are we taking a fleet when we go back?"

  "I think not. I think just three ships. A whole fleet might look like an attack, to—them. Whoever they are." The General shrugged. "If they even exist. We have no proof that this—field—is not a natural phenomenon. Golden couldn't see it without his radar on, and he just drove right into it."

  "And just accidentally happened to drop right into that ringwall," said Boris. "That was just coincidence, right?" No one answered him, and he went on: "If I ever drive a scout near that thing, I won't be so damn sneaky about it. Next time we go in radiating the whole damn frequency spectrum in every direction. If someone spots me, it won't be by accident."

  Adam couldn't tell if the Colonel was serious about his announced plan or not.

  "I intend to take a very good look around there before anyone drives near it again," said the General grimly. "Boris, I want you ready for the best job you ever did, if and when we do go down on Golden. You can pick any planeteers you want, from any crews in the fleet."

  "If you mean to launch from just one ship, my own people are as good as any."

  The General looked at Adam, then back to the Colonel.

  "My crew will be up to full strength now," Brazil added casually. Adam felt a sudden surge of pride and loyalty, about which he would never speak.

  Grodsky considered a moment, then nodded decisively. "All right. Mann, consider yourself aboard. You can go look up your quarters, or whatever you have to do."

  "Yessir!" This time Adam's salute was even sharper than before.

  When the doors of the inner and outer offices were both closed after him, he took a quick look up and down the long main corridor of the flagship to make sure that he was unobserved. Then he snapped his body into a flip, a somersault in the air without touching his hands to the deck. He walked away grinning widely.

  He was still quite a young man. For a time, in time, even the murdered love could be forgotten.

  When the young Spaceman Mann had gone out, leaving the two of them alone, the
General said thoughtfully: "Boris, I wonder if we can really function as a military outfit." They both knew, everyone knew, that the Space Force was organized and equipped and trained for exploration, not for conquest. It had never faced a real war, or anything remotely like one. Who knew what would happen if one came?

  "I do believe that courier captain thought me unmilitary," Brazil answered. "And all I had done was—well, never mind. You really expect we'll get into a fight this time, boss?"

  On an impulse, Grodsky flicked on his big view-screen. The hellish red bulk of nearby Antares seemed to fill the room. Then the slow rotation of the flagship brought into view the tiny green companion star, and then the other multicolored sparks, cloud behind cloud of them, reaching ever farther and dimmer out to infinity.

  "This time, or the next," the General said. "Sooner or later."

  Chapter Five

  General Grodsky's flagship was a big craft, fast and tough, designed for battle as much as any ship could be when battles between ships were virtually unknown. The outer hull of the flagship formed a sphere almost a kilometer in diameter, and like most Space Force ships it bore no permanent name. Its code designation for this mission was Alpha One.

  After a couple of days' passage in flightspace from An tares Base, the flagship appeared in normal space near the Golden system, at a couple of astronomical units' distance above the north pole of Golden's sun. After an hour of general observation from that vantage point the flagship began to move again, staying in normal space this time, traversing a curve that in three unhurried days would bring the explorers aboard into the close vicinity of Planet Four.

  Alpha Two, also custom designed, was a much smaller ship, built for high interstellar speed and long range observation. It winked into existence near the point in space where Alpha One had previously appeared, just as One began to move sunward. Two would alternate with Three, its twin, in observing the activities of One and in carrying news back to An tares Base.

  At a distance of thirty million kilometers General Grodsky ordered his first radar probe of Planet Golden's surface. He found the enveloping forcefield to be exactly as Fakhuri's recordings showed it, covering the world entirely except for an area of a few hundred square kilometers at most, where the field came down in its amplexicaul curve to meet the land surface of one continent. With that verification in hand, Grodsky turned his flagship away from Golden, and spent a standard month in methodical preliminary survey of the system's seven other major planets. On none of them, nor on any of their major satellites, did his teams find any indication of the presence of intelligent life. Or anything at all to suggest an explanation of Planet Golden's unique and mysterious field.

  The preliminary system survey completed, Alpha One returned to the near vicinity of Golden. And now the crew of explorers focused their instruments with great interest upon the surface formation that resembled a lunar ringwall.

  The Ringwall, as the human observers now began to call it, occupied most of a roughly triangular river island eight kilometers across, at the confluence of two great streams in a country of low, rocky hills and subtropical jungle. The big island seemed always to be at least partially obscured by clouds and low mist. And infra-red observations of the area were perpetually fogged as if by volcanic heat.

  For all the observers above the atmosphere were able to tell, the irregular polygon of mountainous walls might be titanic architecture, now partially obscured by jungle growth as well as by mists and clouds. Or it might still have been accepted as an accidental formation. But, if the ambiguous feature were truly accidental, was it only by another accident that it lay exactly at the antipodal point from the place where the Field curved down to planet surface?

  And careful study of Fakhuri's optical recordings showed that, of all the planet's area, Golden's scout had apparently fallen directly into the Ring-wall, scoring a kind of crazy, inexplicable bullseye. Another accident?

  Wherever the scoutship or its wreckage might be now, optical observation from the flagship could detect no trace of it. And the Field continued to prevent all other kinds of observation.

  Colonel Boris Brazil, in the first scoutship launched from Grodsky's flagship toward Golden, drove twice around the planet, keeping about fifteen hundred kilometers above the upper surface of the Field as it was outlined for him by his radar. True to his promise, Colonel Brazil had his ship continuously radiating a wide assortment of signals.

  There was no response from below.

  That evening, ship's time, the Colonel knocked at the door of Adam Mann's tiny cabin, and on hearing a response from inside slid it open. "Alpha Three should be in the system tomorrow, Junior," Brazil announced. "Two will be heading back to Antares; we're sending a robocourier over to her in a couple of hours with mail, if you want to send some."

  Adam was seated at the small desk that folded out of the bulkhead. "Thanks, I was just writing one." He paused. "How did it look today from down there?"

  "Everything looked a lot closer. Here, I'll drop that in the mail bag for you." Leaning in the doorway, the Colonel shamelessly inspected the address on the envelope he had just been handed. Then he held it down at his side, snapping it between long nervous fingers. "Tell you what, Junior, you get ready for a little ride tomorrow. I want someone along to make sure that my scout keeps transmitting on all fifty frequencies. Briefing at oh-five-hundred."

  "Roger!"

  "Don't look so damned happy. It's disgusting. My good planeteers will be driving their own scouts tomorrow." Boris started to close the door, then paused, waving the little envelope. "Say, this Doctor Emiliano Nowell you're writing to—isn't he the one who had that secret biological lab on Ganymede years ago? The geneticist who started all that Jovian superkid business?"

  "Yeah. I used to be invited to visit his estate on Earth a couple of times a year. Got to know some of them. Tell you about it sometime."

  Boris's brows rose over his innocent blue eyes. "You move in exalted circles," he whispered, and made his exit.

  In the morning, Colonel Brazil was all business from the start. "This reminds me a little bit of a mousetrap," he was muttering, as he sat strapped and cushioned in the left seat of the scoutship's little control room, staring at the radar screen in front of him. Alpha One was now something more than a million airless kilometers above the scout; the fair true surface of Planet Golden was only a few hundred klicks below.

  The radar showed the smooth hump of the Field rising high above the scout on all sides, rising higher and higher as Brazil drove the small ship down in a slow descending spiral. It was as if they were dropping into the vortex of a whirpool, a solid maelstrom carved into some fluid invisible to human eyes. The walls of the funnel around them constricted gradually as they descended into it. Below them, a circle of planet surface some fifty kilometers in diameter was shown by radar as free of the Field, and to all appearances this comparatively small area was open to normal landings and exploration. The free area was mixed-looking countryside, to the eye indistinguishable from the land immediately surrounding it.

  "I don't see any bait," said Adam. He was buttoned into the right seat, alertly watching a multitude of screens and indicators. "But we're here, aren't we? Maybe an obvious trap is bait enough for the curious."

  "Now's a fine time to propound that theory," Brazil growled. "How d'ya read me, Alpha One?"

  The distance delay. Then: "We read you loud and clear. Good picture."

  Adam had an excellent imagination, which in his line of work was not always an asset. Right now he could readily imagine the Field-funnel around them closing in on the little scoutship with a sudden snap, dropping the ship rocklike with them inside it to share Alexander Golden's fate. But the Field did not snap shut. The Field did not move at all. No change of any kind had been observed in it since Fakhuri's first recorded sighting.

  A few hours ago, long probes with loops of current-carrying wires attached to them had been lowered into the Field from a hovering scoutship. On the wires
' first contact with the Field the electrical currents in them had instantly ceased. But mice and other small forms of life, lowered into the Field in sealed boxes, had survived the mysterious condition for several minutes without any apparent ill effect. If Golden had survived the crash of his ship—that seemed a vanishingly faint hope —he might still be alive.

  The field-free area of the surface, that the explorers from Earth were now beginning to refer to as the Stem, lay in the low north temperature zone, on Planet Golden's second largest continent. Below the scoutship now, Adam's viewscreens showed rolling, open plains, covered with a probably grass-like plant. The main themes of biology were repeated, sometimes with startling fidelity, from one world to the next, all across the explored Galaxy, wherever closely similar environments obtained in terms of gravity and chemistry, pressure and radiation. Here, patches of deciduous-looking forest were scattered over a line of hills that grew into a range of mountains some kilometers north of the Stem. One of the wide, winding rivers of this continent ran in several places briefly congruent with the intersection of Field and planet surface. But this, again, seemed accidental.

  "Enough for today," said Brazil abruptly, when they had cruised for ten minutes at about two hundred kilometers' altitude. "Let's ease up out of this hole."

  On a sunny afternoon a few days later, Adam and Boris were scouting again, cruising within a kilometer of the surface, now with the feeling of being part of the world below. The starship overhead was of course invisible to them beyond the sky.

  Early summer was warming and brightening Golden's northern hemisphere. The screens showed a view of green plains and forests that made the scoutship cabin feel stuffy.

  "Makes me feel like I want to get out and go camping," Adam commented.

  Brazil only grunted. He was easing the scout still lower, losing altitude at a rate of a few meters per second. The small ship slid forward through the clear summer sky at a couple of hundred kilometers per hour.