He knew that only rising warmth could have recalled him.
A sun?
The Great Twin itself?
That was not possible.
Thanking Deity that the computers were not operated from the drive panel, he directed them to provide enzyme vision and in a moment gazed straight ahead at a smallish yellow sun near the centre of the forward field.
So Deity did … He wasted no time on that beyond a transient thought that every chance must come to coincidence at some time in the life of the universe—and that he might as well be winner as any other.
He asked the navigating computer for details: distance, size, luminescence. Slowly, because vegetal processes cannot be hurried, the thing made its observations and calculations and offered them. Obediently it unrolled the stellar chart and almanac—and Fernix knew where he was.
And, he thought, little good that brings me.
This was a star not easily naked-eye visible from the Home World, but the astronomers had long ago pinpointed it and its unseen planets. He was forty-seven light years from home (his mind accepted without understanding the abyss of time passed) on a course plunging him into the gravity well of an all-too-welcoming star at some thirty-two miles per second. The computer assured him that on his present course this yellow sun, though a child by comparison with the Great Twin, was powerful enough to grasp him and draw him into its atmosphere of flame.
But he had not come so far across time and space to die sitting still, eaten alive by a pigmy star.
He needed to buy time for thought. Deceleration alone was not enough for useful flight.
There was a blue-green planet, the almanac told him, which might possibly offer livable conditions. The hope was small in a universe where minute changes of temperature, orbit or atmosphere composition could put a world for ever beyond life, but the Deity which had guided him so finely and so far could surely crown His miracle with a greater one.
If he could achieve steering …
He was tempted to jemmy the cover off the Drive Panel and expose the linkages but common sense suggested that he would merely cause greater damage. He was coldly aware of ignorance and lack of mechanical talent; the maze of linkages would be to him just that—a maze, impenetrable.
Because he was untrained he failed for several hours to hit on the possibility that the the computer, once programmed to act rather than simply inform the pilot, might operate directly on the machine structures, bypassing linkages and levers. The entertainment media had imprinted him and all but those who actually operated space craft with a mental picture of pilots working by manual control, whereas it might be necessary only to tell the computer what he wanted.
That turned out to be anything but simple. As a gunnery officer he considered himself computer competent but he slept several times before he penetrated the symbols, information needs and connections of the highly specialized machine. Like most junior officers he had been rushed through an inadequate basic training and sent into space innocent of the peacetime auxiliary courses, with no expertise in other than visual navigation.
But, finally, the steering jets turned the pod end for end, the main jet roared triumphantly and the little craft slowed at the limit of deceleration his consciousness could bear. Held firmly in his straps with an arm weighing like stonewood, he questioned the computer about trajectories and escape velocities and how it might take him to the third planet of the yellow star.
It balanced distance against fuel and calculated a slingshot rounding of the central sun which would bring him economically to his goal, his destiny. There would be, Fernix knew, only a single chance and choice.
* * *
A Miner’s Mate is, more correctly, an Asteroid Mining Navigational and Mass Detection Buoy. One of them sat sedately above a group of fairly large iridium-bearing ‘rocks’ in the Belt, providing guidance for the occasional incoming or outgoing scow and warning against rogue intruders—meteorites or small asteroids in eccentric orbits. It carried a considerable armament, including two fusion bombs capable of shattering a ten million tonne mass, but large wanderers were rare and collision orbits rarer still. Its warnings commonly did little more than send miners scurrying to the sheltered side of their rock until the danger passed.
Since space debris travels at speeds of miles per second, the sensitivity radius of the Mate’s radar and vision systems was necessarily large. It registered the incoming pod at a million kilometres. Being fully automatic, it had no intelligence to find anything peculiar in the fact that it saw the thing before the mass detectors noted its presence. It simply radioed a routine alert to the mines and thereafter conscientiously observed.
The Shift Safety Monitor at the communication shack saw the tiny, brilliant point of light on his screen and wondered briefly what sort of craft was blasting inwards from the outer orbits. Scientific and exploratory probes were continuously listed and there were none due in this area of the System. Somebody racing home in emergency? Automatically he looked for the mass reading and there was none. What could the bloody Mate be doing? The mass of metal that put out such a blast must be easily measurable.
The Monitor’s name was John Takamatta; he was a Murri from Western Queensland. This particular group of mines was a Murri venture and he was a trained miner and emergency pilot, now taking his turn on the dreary safety shift. Like most of his people he rarely acted without careful observation first; he waited for the Mate to declare or solve its problem.
The Mate’s problem was that it could not recognize timber or any substance that let most of its beam through and diffused it thoroughly in passage. There was metal present but not enough to contain the tubes for such a drive blast and there was ceramic, probably enough for linings, but the amorphous mass surrounding these was matter for conjecture and conjecture was outside its capacity.
However, it tried, feeding back to the Mines computer a flicker of figures which mimicked a state of desperate uncertainty and gave the impression of a large, fuzzy thing of indefinite outline secreting within it some small metal components and ceramic duct lining.
Takamatta tried to enlarge the screen image but the size of the light did not change. It was either very small or far away or both.
The Mate’s hesitant figures hovered round something under a tonne but no mass so slight could contain such brilliance. Yet it could only be a ship and there were no ships of that nursery size. He rang the dormitory for the off-duty, sleeping Computer Technician. Albert Tjilkamati would curse him for it but they were related, men of the same Dreaming, and the curse would be routinely friendly.
Albert came, cursed, watched, sent a few test orders to the Mate and decided that it was not malfunctioning, yet the oscillating, tentative figures suggested a human operator floundering with an observation beyond his competence. Once the analogy had occurred to him, he saw the force of it.
“Something it can’t recognize, John. Its beam is being diffused and spread from inner surfaces—like light shining into a box of fog. The receptors don’t understand. John, man, it’s picked up something new in space! We’ll be in the newscasts!”
He called Search and Rescue’s advance base in the Belt.
* * *
The Search and Rescue Watch Officer knew Albert Tjilkamati; if he said ‘strange’ and ‘unusual,’ then strange and unusual the thing was.
“OK, Albert; I’ll send a probe. Get back to you later.”
He eased a torpedo probe out of its hangar, instructed its computers and sent it to intercept the flight path of the stranger. The probe was mainly a block of observational and analytical equipment in a narrow, twelve-metre tube, most of which was fuel tank; it leapt across the sky at an acceleration that would have broken every bone in a human body.
Starting from a point five million kilometres retrograde from the orbit of the Murri Mines, it used the Miner’s Mate broadcast to form a base for triangulation and discovered at once that the incoming craft was decelerating at a g-number so high that the prob
e would have to recalculate its navigating instructions in order to draw alongside. It would, in fact, have to slow down and let the thing catch up with it.
The Watch Officer asked his prime computer for enhancement of the fuzzy mass/size estimates of the Mate, but the machine could not decide what the craft was made of or precisely where its edges were.
At this point, as if aware of observation, the craft’s blast vanished from the screen.
The Watch Officer was intrigued but not much concerned; his probe had it on firm trace and would not let go. He notified HQ Mars, which was providentially the nearest HQ to him, of an incoming ‘artificial object of unknown origin’, accompanied by a full transcript of the Mate’s data, stated: ‘Intelligence probe despatched’ and sat back to contemplate the probable uproar at HQ Mars. The lunatic fringe would be in full babble.
* * *
The computer, not Fernix, had cut the pod’s blast because its velocity had dropped to the effective rate for rounding the system’s sun. There would be corrections later as approach allowed more accurate data on the star’s mass and gravity but for two million kilometres the pod would coast.
Fernix drifted into sleep. Transformation sleep conferred no healing, being essentially a reduction of metabolism to preservative zero; nothing was lost or gained during the hiatus. So he had awakened still in reaction to the stress of escape from Deadly Thorn and now needed sleep.
He woke again to the stridency of an alarm. The computer flashed characters in urgent orange, proclaiming the presence of a mass in steady attendance above and to the right of the pod and no more than twice its length distant.
He realized sluggishly that the mass must be a ship; only a ship equipped with damping screens could have approached so closely without detection.
The thought brought him fully alert. He opened a narrow vision slit and at first saw nothing; then he observed the slender occulting of stars. The thing was in darkness and probably painted black, else the central sun should have glinted on its nose.
If this was an artefact of the local life, he needed to find out what he could about it, even at the risk of exposing himself—if that was indeed a risk. The crew might well be friendly. He primed a camera for minimum exposure and, to aid it, turned the pod’s lighting up full and opened the vision slit to his head’s width for a tenth of a second.
It was enough for the camera to take its picture. It was enough, also, for the other to shoot through the gap a beam of intense light to take its own picture and blind Fernix’s weak eyes. He flung his arms across his face and grunted with pain until his sight cleared. He stayed in darkness with the slit closed. He reasoned that he had been photographed by a race whose vision stretched further into the shortwave light spectrum than his and not so far into the gentler infra-red.
When the ache in his eyes subsided he examined his own infra-red picture. It showed a slender needle of nondescript colour, dull and non-reflective, without visible portes. The small diameter of the craft inclined him to think it was an unmanned reconnaissance probe. His evolutionary teaching dictated that an intelligent life form must perforce have its brain case and sensory organs raised well above ground level, and no such entity could have stood upright or even sat comfortably in that projectile.
He considered what action he might take.
He had been outplayed at the observation game and could do nothing about that. His weaponless pod was not equipped to fight, which was perhaps as well; nothing would be gained by antagonising these unknown people. Evasive action was out of the question. His fuel supply was low and his computer’s decisions had been made on limits too tight for any but last ditch interference from himself; there was none for ad hoc manoeuvre.
He could take no action. The next move must come from outside.
Conclusion reached, he slept.
* * *
The Search and Rescue call sign squealed in the shack, the screen cleared and Takamarra looked up from his novel as the Watch Officer hailed him, “John, oh John, have we got something here! This one will puncture holes in your Dreaming!”
John said coldly, “Indeed.” He was no traditionalist but did not appreciate light handling of his cultural mores by a white man.
Some fifteen seconds would pass before his reply reached S & R and fifteen more for the Watch Officer’s response. In that time he digested the message and concluded that the unlikely was true, that the intruding craft was extra-systemic. Alien. And that the existence of life among the stars could have some effect on the credibility of Murri Dreaming.
Then he decided that it would not. Incursion of the white man and knowledge of a huge world beyond the oceans had altered most things in his people’s lives but not that one thing, the Dreamings around which the Murri cultures were built. Science and civilization might rock on their foundations as the word went out, We are not alone, but the ancient beliefs would not shift by the quiver of a thought.
Willy Grant’s voice said, “Get this carefully, John. Make notes. We need the biggest scow you’ve got because yours is the nearest mining group. We want to pick this little ship out of the sky but we can’t get a magnetic grapple on it because what little metal there is appears to be shielded. The best bet is to clamp it in the loading jaws of your Number Three scow if it’s available. The thing is only ten metres long and three wide, so it will fit in easily. The scow can dawdle sunwards and let the outsider catch up with it until they are matched for speed. Forty-eight hours at one point five g should do it. This is an Emergency Order, John, so time and fuel compensation will be paid. Relay that to your Manager, but pronto. The scow’s computer can talk to mine about course and speed and we’ll have your Manager’s balls in a double reef knot if he raises objections. Got it?”
“Got it, Willy.” He repeated the message for check. “Hang on while I pass it.” Minus the threat; the Elder might not appreciate blunt humour.
The Murri Duty Manager preserved the Old Man routine of unimpressed self-possession, which fooled nobody. He turned his eyes from his screen, contemplated infinity in his fingernails for a respectable sixty seconds, raised his white-bearded head with an air of responsible decision-making and said, “Number Three scow is empty and available. It shall be floated off. The S & R computer can then take over.” He would not have had the nerve to say otherwise; nobody in space flouted S & R.
Grant, on the other screen, heard the message and beat down the temptation to wink at John; the tribal old dear would be outraged and so would his miners. The Murri were good blokes but in some areas you had to tread carefully. When the Manager had cut out, he said, “Now, John, this’ll rock you from here to Uluru. Look!”
He displayed a picture of the intruder illuminated by the probe’s beam. It was shaped roughly like an appleseed, symmetrical and smooth, its line broken only by what must be a surprisingly narrow jet throat. Its colour seemed to be a deep brown, almost ebony.
“Now, get this!” He homed the viewpoint to a distance of a few inches from the hull. “What do you make of it?”
What John saw surprised him very much. The hull surface was grained like wood; there was even a spot where some missile (sand-grain meteoroid?) had gouged it to expose a slightly lighter colour and what was surely a broken splinter end.
Willy carried on talking. You do not wait for an answer across a thirty second delay. “Looks like wood, doesn’t it? Well, see this!” The view roved back and forth from nose to tail, and the wave pattern of the grain flowed evenly along the whole length. “You’d think they grew the thing and lathed it out of a single block. And why not? A ship doesn’t have to be built of steel, does it? I know timber couldn’t stand the take-off and landing strains but how about if they are ferried up in bulk in a metal mother ship or built on asteroids and launched at low speed? Or there could be means of hardening and strengthening timber; we don’t know because we’ve never needed to do it. But a race on a metal-poor world would develop alternative technologies. I’d stake a month’s pay the thing’
s made of wood, John.”
In John’s opinion he would have won the bet.
Willy did not display the other picture, the shocker taken when the alien tried to photograph the probe. Under instruction he had given Takamatta enough to satisfy immediate curiosity without providing food for the idiot fantasy that flourishes when laymen are presented with too much mystery and too few answers.
Alone he studied the startling hologram, at life size, which his computer had built for him.
It seemed that the alien had also taken a shot of the probe just as the automatic camera took advantage of the widening slit in the intruder’s hull. The thing’s face—‘face’ for want of a word—stared at him over what was surely a camera lens.
The alien—being, entity, what you would—seemed generally patterned on an anthropoid model with a skin dappled in grey and green. The head and neck protruded above shoulders from which sprang arms or extensions of some kind—probably arms, Willy thought, because on the thing’s camera rested what should be fingers, though they looked more like a bunch of aerial roots dropped by some variety of creeper but thicker and, judging by their outlandish grasping, more flexible than fingers.
In the narrow head he could discern no obvious bone structure under thick—flesh? The face was repulsive in the vague fashion of nightmare when the horror is incompletely seen. There was a mouth, or something in the place of a mouth—an orifice, small and round with slightly raised edges where lips should have been. He thought of a tube which would shoot forward to fix and suck. Nose there was none. The eyes—they had to be eyes—were circular black discs with little holes at their centres.
He guessed hazily that black eyes, totally receptive of all wavelengths of light, could be very powerful organs of vision, given the outlandish nervous system necessary to operate them. Or, perhaps, the central holes were the receptors, like pinhole cameras.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 47
