Fifth Planet

by Fred Hoyle

  He saw her looking at him with dumb disbelief.

  ‘Can’t you understand for once, Cathy? Tonight only a handful of people will know where Mike Fawsett has gone. Tomorrow a lot more people will know, and by the end of the week a whole lot of people will know. You can probably find him within three days but you cannot find him tonight.’

  At last she seemed to grasp what he was driving at. He took the things back to the kitchen, made himself another drink, and went off alone to his own room.

  The big show at the landing-field was of course a complete facade. The staff officers and their advisers of both sides were counting the minutes until they could get the three astronauts away. The Russians in particular wanted to get Ilyana and Pitoyan into their hands at the earliest possible moment. The first couple of hours would be critical. The party stayed as a whole until they reached a big military base about two hundred miles north of Miami. They made the distance quickly, in less than three hours, for of course the road was cleared ahead of them.

  The steps were as formal and as carefully laid out as in an old-fashioned dance. First there were congratulations from all sides. The Western officers pinned decorations on the tunics of all three of them. The Russian officers did

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  exactly the same thing. There was an intense bout of handshaking, and at last two very powerfully built young colonels in Red Army uniform asked Pitoyan and Ilyana to follow them.

  With instant perception Ilyana saw that this was the dividing point. If she once left the room with these two men it would be much harder to return than it would be to stay now. She told them in a very soft voice that she wished to stay. Again they repeated the request politely, they used colloquial Russian so that it would be difficult for the Westerners to understand them. Ilyana shook her head. They spoke in a rather louder voice. As she had expected, the request had become an order. She turned to Fiske, ‘They’re trying to take me away. I don’t want to go.’

  Fiske grinned, ‘That’s swell. Then you don’t go.’

  But now the Russians were angry. One of the colonels spoke to his General in a voice that reverberated around the room. The General did not deign to deal directly either with Ilyana or with Fiske. 'He addressed his Western peer, the Western General in charge. He demanded that an escort be provided to take the two Russian astronauts to the waiting cars outside. The Western General gave an order, and a young American colonel came up to 'her and said, ‘It’s better if you go, ma’am.’

  The Western General knew that he was teetering on the verge of a major international incident. He rather liked the look of the trim little girl, but he wasn’t risking his career for any girl. He took her by the arm and said, ‘Come, my dear.’ Ilyana looked wildly up into Tom’s face. ‘Don’t let them take me,’ she cried.

  The vision of a grassy track came to Tom Fiske. He remembered the crushing weight of the man across his shoulder as a girl came towards him, he remembered the first time he had made love to her. ‘Listen, Mac,’ he said to the General, ‘if you don’t take your hands off her I’ll bust the whole thing wide open in the papers. After what I’ll do to you you’ll be lucky to be retired on a five-bit pension.’

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  Fiske knew that in the corridors of power he was finished now, but he also knew that not even the Government, let alone the pip-squeak General, could stand up to the fury that would break loose if the girl were handed over against her will. In the past he’d managed to look after himself and he saw no reason why he shouldn’t go on doing so. He’d made the grade in his own eyes, and now he’d got the girl he wanted.

  The General tried to outstare him. Then he saw Fiske’s hand knotted at his side, and with a muttered exclamation he swung on his heels and left the room. Fiske took all the medals off Ilyana’s chest and off his own, flung them in the air, and walked out after the General with Ilyana on his arm. Nobody challenged him. The great God of Publicity was his protector.

  Pitoyan saw what had happened and licked his lips nervously. He would have liked to do the same thing, not for personal or ideological reasons, but because it would have avoided a lot of awkward questions. But when they told him to go out to the cars, he fell into the trap that Ilyana had avoided. He thought it would be best to give himself time to think it over. He could always make his decision later on.

  But there wasn’t very much of a later-on. Once inside the car he couldn’t get out, he was flanked by two big fellows, and his right arm was still not too good. They drove for two hours and then turned into an airport, a small airport. An air ferry was waiting, and it was of Russian manufacture. He was escorted to it by a party almost equally composed of Russians and Americans. It might still have been possible to have got away, but there was more than a risk that the Americans would lose if it came to a scuffle, and after what had happened to Ilyana there was no reason why they should take his side. He allowed himself to be pushed on to the plane, and within four hours, before dawn, he was in Moscow.

  There was no welcoming crowd for Pitoyan at the airport, where they landed in a deserted section. A sleek powerful

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  car was waiting. Within half an hour they were driving into Red Square. He was ushered into a room hung with pictures of the devoted leaders of the East. They were actually waiting for him, The Party was waiting, an array of strong, ruthless men.

  He saw now what Ilyana had clearly seen the previous evening. He wondered where .Ilyana might be at the moment. It would not have relieved the tight sickness in his stomach to have known that she was sleeping in a hotel in the Virginia mountains, her fair hair streaming over the bare shoulder of Tom Fiske.

  The President began to speak, and as he did so Pitoyan gathered his wits. He knew he had to be good, and he was. The story he told had a crude sense of theatre about it.

  He knew that his case would not be decided until after all possible investigations had been made. And he knew the cast of mind of the men he was dealing with. He started with the unvarnished truth. He told them of how he had calculated the way through the gravitational fields, and he told them of how the Westerners had asked him for an orbit when their transmissions to Earth became jammed. He knew that Fiske would not attempt to deny this part of the story. Fiske would not be concerned to please the Western authorities, he had seen that for himself. He told of a how a landing had been made, and of the nature of the place where they had landed. His story so far had ninety-nine per cent truth, the one per cent he omitted was the failure of Bakovsky to read the landing servo mechanism, and he made no mention of the subsequent debacle.

  So far so good, it held up. Next he told of how the Westerners had landed within a hundred miles. This was already a breach of etiquette between East and West, for he made no mention of his own distress signal. There were comments round the table. Had he any proof? Yes, he had a set of micro films in his pocket. If he could have permission to show them ... The President gave him permission.

  He showed them a very beautiful photograph of Achilles

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  taken from orbit with the telescopic scanner. The men around him were impressed, for being ruthless does not prevent one from being impressed. He showed them the places where the two ships had landed, very close together they seemed on the slide. As for proof he could only show them pictures of the two ships on the ground. He pointed out that without flying over them, which he had not been able to do, it was impossible to show both rockets on the same picture. So he would have to show them separately. This he did, taking care that the picture of the Russian ship should be one taken from straight ahead so that it did not seem to lean. He realized that it was lucky he had not used a stereoscopic camera.

  He explained how the Americans had proposed that they should explore the planet jointly, suggesting that because of the long journey both crews were really too small for the task, and
that it would be better if they joined forces. Also they wished to repay the Russians for the calculation of the orbit.

  There were reproving looks around the table and the President boomed, ‘Beware the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.’ There were approving nods at this cultured expression of the general point of view.

  It was going the way Pitoyan had hoped. He told them that Bakovsky had refused the invitation because it was obvious that what the Americans really wanted was Ilyana. This was a shrewd tactic, for it must count heavily in his favour that one of the Americans had now got Ilyana. Also to quote Latin, but to himself, post hoc - propter hoc.

  The relations between the two camps had gone from bad to worse. This nobody around the table found any difficulty in believing. It ended in a fight, a fight in which the Russian side was badly handicapped by the presence of himself and Ilyana. It was a fight of four professionals against two. In spite of the bad odds the Russians at first gave as good as they got. On the Western side the death of Crewman Rein- bach compensated for that of Ivan Kratov, hero of the Soviet Union. But with the death of Kratov the odds against

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  them became worse. It was now a case of three experienced professionals against one, against Bakovsky aided only by an inexperienced scientist and a woman. The last straw was when his own arm was broken in a bad fall, which verged delicately on the truth. Then they had retreated to their ship, as die Trojans had done behind their wall. There were nods of appreciation at this allusion to the President’s remark. His imagination now alive with the history of Troy, he told them of how the Americans had approached under the cover of darkness, of how they had placed wire ropes round the ship, and of how they had finally managed to pull it off balance with the aid of a powerful winch. He showed them a photograph of the leaning rocket to prove his point.

  Experts were called in at this stage to study the picture. He was asked why they had not blasted off, why they had waited there and allowed themselves to be pulled over. On the face of it it seemed as absurd as a turtle allowing itself to be turned on its back. Then he reminded them that the rocket had not been stripped down and it would have been technically unsound for them to have started back to Earth using the old worn-out motors. This figured, as the Westerners said.

  The next question, of course, was why they had not stripped down the rocket. By now Pitoyan had a firm hold of the situation - because the constant sniping of the American warmongers had made work on the rocket impossible. He added that these decisions had not of course been taken by himself but by Bakovsky. This brought them back to the story, although by now they could almost fit the rest together for themselves.

  With the ship off-balance it was impossible for them to do anything else but surrender. So they had come down from above and had allowed themselves to be led away prisoner to the American Camp. The Westerners took Ilyana for their own purposes. He and Bakovsky had been set to menial tasks while the Americans stripped down their ship. The

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  great Bakovsky, also hero of the Soviet Union, had managed to conceal a grenade. Regardless of his own safety, he had thrown it right in the face of the warmongers. The proof was that their leader, Larson, was dead, and that their vicecaptain, the English-American Fawsett, was now lying mutilated in an American hospital. The man Fawsett had even been paraded before the whole world immediately after the landing. But Bakovsky had been shot, shot down like a dog as he attempted to escape.

  Pitoyan decided that he was embroidering the story a little too much, and he determined to keep himself more in check.

  There were only two more awkward points. Why had Ilyana and himself been brought back to Earth? Crewman Fiske had taken them with him in the returning rocket for three separate and very obvious reasons. He did not wish to be entirely alone with the mutilated man during the long months of the voyage. He had clear and obvious reasons for taking Ilyana. And he had an equally obvious reason for taking Pitoyan, namely to calculate the orbit along which they must return.

  Here he was at the last barrier. Why had Fiske not jettisoned them from the ship before they reached Earth? As for Ilyana, he pointed out to the Committee that the Westerners were masters of vice, and Ilyana had fallen a prey to this. Her behaviour the previous day showed just how far she had fallen. And as for himself things had been very difficult and dangerous. With his injured arm he had been no match physically for the big American. He had only been able to save himself by his wits.

  Pitoyan paused for a moment, he now had the whole affair in his grasp. He told them what they must already have seen, that the American, Fiske, had known that the truth would be unpalatable, even to his own Government, so he had made up an absurd story of strange accidents on the planet. Fiske had made up stories about men being lost, of failures in their gyros, and of a curious discharge of

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  electricity that was supposed to have killed two of them. The one hope he had of being believed, and of the true story not coming out, was for his two Russian passengers to corroborate his tale. This Pitoyan had promised to do, and Fiske, being basically a simple-minded man, had believed him. All the comrades who had met him at the landing-field would report on how he had never shown either by word or by gesture the slightest intention of asking to stay in the West. He had, in fact, come immediately home.

  There was just one thing more, which Pitoyan said to himself alone. He must from now on avoid all temptation to embroider the story any more. He knew it was a good one, but thorough investigation might throw up a few loopholes, The danger was that in attempting to plug them he would endanger the bigger and more important aspects. What he must do was to stick absolutely to his story. He must refuse the temptation to extend it at all costs. If need be he must simply claim ignorance, he must claim that there had been times when he had been completely out of action through the accident to his arm.

  It is not known whether the experts who sifted Pitoyan’s yam had more than passing suspicions. History simply records that a week later Pitoyan was given a hero’s welcome. A reduced parade was held in Red Square and Pitoyan was accorded the honour of addressing it. They gave him beautiful medals and, more important, made him a professor at his old university. With his characteristic ingenuity he soon discovered that the original short list of girls drawn up for the expedition were all almost exactly like Ilyana. About a quarter of them had married during the past year or so, but this left him with opportunities that were more than ample for his simple tastes.

  It may well be imagined how steeply the tension now rose between the East and the West. The Russian Government was conditioned by a century and a half of its own propaganda to believe just such a story as Pitoyan had produced for them. The President called a meeting of the Supreme

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  Soviet and addressed them angrily for five hours. In the Western capitals, officials warned their Governments that the Russians were genuinely angry. They had every reason to be. They had lost their ship, their men, and even their chit of a girl. Much worse, they had lost their face, both cheeks; and that they would never forgive.

  Urgent advice was given for the West to call a summit meeting forthwith, and for them to make every possible attempt to placate the Russians.

  It was also noted that steps had instantly been taken against those mathematicians who had advised the inclusion of Ilyana in the party. The three academicians who had refereed Popkin’s paper were immediately declared minus five, which meant they were exiled from the five main cities of Russia, while Popkin himself was branded minus fifty, which meant that he would never be allowed to return even to his native Rostov.

  T-f

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cathy

  The day after the landing Conway tried to find the whereabouts of Mike Fawsett but, as he had expected, none of his contacts knew. He tried the next morning, too
, and was on the point of packing it in when a siren sounded in the lane outside. The County Sheriff, resplendent in uniform, stumped up the path to the bungalow. He made a strenuous root-a-toot on the door with his fist and, when Conway answered, said, ‘Are you Conway?’

  Conway said he was, and that he’d already bought tickets for the Policemen’s Bazaar.

  ‘O.K., O.K.,’ grunted the big fellow, sunlight glinting re- splendently on his polished badge, as he heaved himself over the threshold.

  ‘Don’t think I’m being personal, but could you tell me your wife’s name?’

  Cathy appeared and took in the scene in a vague soft of way.

  ‘Have we done something wrong ?’

  ‘Nothing that I know of, ma’am. I’d be kinda obliged if you could tell me your name.’

  ‘It’s Cathy Conway, isn’t it?’

  This was the sort of thing that drove Conway up the wall and half-way across the ceiling.

  ‘That’s sorta what we hoped. We need you urgently up in Washington, ma’am.’

  Then he crammed on his big 'hat and added, ‘I’d be obliged if we could be on our way. At your convenience, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’nodded Conway.

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  In the car he gradually pieced together that Fawsett was in a military hospital up in Washington. The man was apparently delirious and kept crying out for ‘Cathy’.

  Within a couple of hours they’d been put through on the ferry to Washington. Two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, were waiting for them.

  ‘We’d like to take the lady along right away,’ said the captain.

  Conway saw no point in demurring. The sooner Cathy went out to the hospital the better.

  ‘We can fix you up for the night,’ added the captain.

  ‘Not unless you’ve got something near the centre of the city. I’d prefer to hunt around for myself.’

  ‘Better you than us, sir,’ grinned the lieutenant.

  Conway allowed them to take Cathy away, after making a note of the whereabouts of the hospital. Then he burnt up the telephone wires chasing one acquaintance after another. He concentrated mainly on the bachelors because they were the most likely to be out of town. At last he got what he wanted, the loan of the apartment of a fellow who was away in South America for a couple of weeks. Next he hired a car, spent ten minutes with a map, then nosed out on to the road on his way to the hospital. Either Fawsett must be pooped, poor devil, or maybe he had some odd form of delirium. Some sort of 'loss of memory. Perhaps they wanted Cathy to try to wake his memory.