by James White
Citizens wishing to make contact with those of another species used ultralong-range aircraft or intra-plane-tary spaceships. Such contacts were encouraged, but only if they did not involve the risk of individual or species invasion of privacy. So touchy were some of the cultures that the stratosphere of the entire Federation World had been rendered opaque so that Citizens would not be able to watch each other through telescopes by looking upward and across their hollow superplanet.
The vast structure was a superthin eggshell of metal which was ultra-hard and fantastically dense, and the soils and atmospheres covering its inner surface were synthetic and produced when population additions required them. Where the atmospheres of adjoining species were mutually toxic, one-hundred-mile-high walls, transparent in the higher altitudes so as not to interfere with the sunlight, separated the two areas. These were similar to the walls which encircled the five-hundred-mile entry ports, positioned at the points of the conical polar extensions, to keep the atmosphere from being lost into extraplanetary space.
In the gravity-free polar areas were the great, thou-sand-mile-square tracts of bare metal on which were built the atmosphere and soil synthesizers, the matter transmitter units, searchship building and maintenance docks, and the power sources for the long-range projectors which could turn aside or destroy any astronomical body large enough to endanger the giant sphere by collision.
All at once the awful immensity of the Federation World, the incredibly high level of knowledge which had created and maintained it, and the inutterable pettiness of his suspicions made Martin want to run away and hide himself. He felt like an aboriginal grasshut dweller suddenly confronted with a block of skyscraper offices and Rush-hour traffic.
“You are inviting us to join you,” he said numbly, “and you built that!”
WE DID NOT BUILD THE FEDERATION WORLD; NOR WOULD WE BE CAPABLE OF DOING SO IN THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. PLEASE TURN AROUND AND REGARD ME.
He turned quickly. The others, no doubt because they had already had this experience, turned more slowly. The wall on his right had become transparent, or maybe it was a wall-sized television screen showing a creature, lying or perhaps standing surrounded by a complex control desk. It was vaguely crablike, with too many legs; and appendages; the body was covered by warty excrescences and fleshy, frondlike growths. The single eye was wide and bulging, like a transparent sausage with two independently moving pupils. He had seen a pictoral representation of one of these beings in the reception area of the induction center, but this entity bore about as much resemblance to the picture as a real animal did to a cute cartoon treatment by Disney.
NO DOUBT YOU FIND ME AS VISUALLY REPULSIVE — AS I DO YOU. THE FEELING DIMINISHES AFTER REPEATED CONTACT BUT TO ANSWER THE QUESTION YOU WERE ABOUT TO ASK. THE FED-WORLD WAS THE ULTIMATE PROJECT, IN PURELY PHYSICAL TERMS, OF AN INCREDIBLY ANCIENT RACE WHICH NO LONGER DWELLS ALTHOUGH THEY STILL MAKE NON-PHYSICAL CONTACT EVERY FEW CENTURIES IN WE NEED ASSISTANCE OR ADVICE. THE PROBABILITY IS THAT THEY HAVE EVOLVED TO A STAGE WHERE PHYSICAL EXISTENCE IS NO LONGER A REQUIREMENT. THEY ARE THE BUILDERS.
MY RACE, WHICH WAS THEN AND STILL REMAINS THE MOST HIGHLY ADVANCED OF THOSE ENCOUNTERED IN THE GALAXY, WAS AMONG THE FIRST TO BE INVITED TO JOIN THE FEDERATION WORLD. WE ALSO HAD OUR SHARE OF RESTLESS AND IMPATIENT ENTITIES WHO WERE NOT SURE THAT THE SAFE. PROTECTED, AND INFINITELY SPACIOUS FEDERATION WORLD WAS FOR THEM. THESE PEOPLE WERE SELECTED AND TRAINED BY THE BUILDERS TO DO THE RELATIVELY MENIAL TASKS. ON EARTH YOU WOULD CALL US ERRAND BOYS, ODD-JOB MEN, SERVANTS. WE WERE TAUGHT HOW TO USE AND MAINTAIN THIS WORLD’S EQUIPMENT. OTHER SPECIES COMMUNICATION AND ASSESSMENT TECHNIQUES, AND THE CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATION OF HYPERSHIPS FOR THE CONTINUING SEARCH PROGRAM.
WE FOUND THAT IN EVERY SPECIES SO FAR INVITED TO JOIN THE FEDERATION THERE WERE INVARIABLY A SMALL NUMBER WHO, INTELLECTUALLY OR EMOTIONALLY. COULD NOT ACCEPT THE INVITATION. THESE ENTITIES, THE NON-CITIZENS. CONTINUE TO JOIN US AND ASSIST IN PERFORMING THE TASKS SET BY THE BUILDERS.
One of the being’s appendages rose ponderously to indicate the dense, shining star field and the pointed, ovoid silhouette that was the great, single world of the Federation of Galactic Sentients, and it went on,
OUR PRINCIPAL TASK IS TO SEEK OUT THE INTELLIGENT RACES OF THE GALAXY AND BRING THEM INTO THE SECURITY AND FREEDOM OF THE WORLD THAT THE BUILDERS HAVE PROVIDED FOR THEM, BEFORE THEY PERISH IN THEIR OWN PLANETARY EFFLUVIA OR SOME OTHER CATASTROPHE BEFALLS THEM.
AFTER SUITABLE TRAINING, YOUR TASKS WILL INCLUDE ASSISTING US WITH SEARCHSHIP OPERATIONS AND CANDIDATE ASSESSMENT, WORK WHICH, CONSIDERING YOUR PRESENT STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT, WILL TAX YOUR ABILITIES TO THE FULL. TO AID YOU THERE ARE THE FACILITIES OF THE FEDERATION MEDICAL ESTABLISHMENTS WHICH WILL EXTEND YOUR LIFE SPAN AND PHYSICAL CAPABILITIES SO THAT YOUR LENGTHY TRAINING CAN BE PUT TO EFFECTIVE USE. IF AT ANY TIME YOUR WORK AS A NON-CITIZEN BECOMES TOO ONEROUS. YOU WILL BE GRANTED FEDERATION CITIZENSHIP AS A RIGHT.
LIFE IN THE FEDERATION WORLD IS MORE LEISURELY. ITS PURPOSE WAS AND IS TO BRING TOGETHER ALL THE INTELLIGENT RACES OF THE GALAXY AND LET THEM INTERMINGLE AND GROW SO THAT, IN THE FAR FUTURE, THE PURPOSE OF THE BUILDERS WILL COME TO FRUITION. THIS PURPOSE IS PRESENTLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO US, BUT WE HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT THE COMBINED INTELLIGENCE AND POTENTIAL OF THESE FUTURE FEDERATION CITIZENS WILL FAR SURPASS ANYTHING ACHIEVABLE BY EVEN THE BUILDERS. IT WILL BE A SLOW, NATURAL PROCESS, HOWEVER, KEPT FREE OF ANY KIND OF FORCE OR COERCION.
IN THE MEANTIME WE SHALL BE BUSY SEEKING OUT AND ADDING RACES TO THE FEDERATION, ENSURING ITS SAFETY FROM NATURAL THREATS FROM WITHOUT AND THE POISON OF UNDESIRABLES FROM WITHIN. YOUR LIFE FROM NOW ON WILL BE VERY BUSY, PERHAPS EXACTING. BUT NOT LONELY AS THE SERVANTS AND PROTECTORS OF THE FEDERATION, YOU WILL.COOPERATE CLOSELY WITH AND LEARN TO UNDERSTAND ENTITIES OF MANY DIFFERENT SPECIES. LONG BEFORE THE CITIZENS ARE READY TO DO SO. BECAUSE WE HAVE A VERY IMPORTANT QUALITY IN COMMON — THE QUALITY WHICH OUR SYSTEM OF EXAMINERS WAS PRIMARILY DESIGNED TO UNCOVER.
For a few moments the screen remained blank, and ‘ Martin looked quickly at the other people in the room. The woman he had met earlier smiled faintly and said, “They do say that it is better to start a job at the bottom…” The others seemed to be looking somewhere deep within themselves and were silent.
He returned his attention to the monstrous, crablike being. Was it his imagination or was there really a glint of amusement in that great, bulging sausage of an eye as once more the non-Citizen’s words were projected onto the screen.
CONGRATULATIONS. YOU HAVE BEEN EXAMINED AND HAVE BEEN FOUND UNSUITABLE FOR CITIZENSHIP IN THE FEDERATION OF GALACTIC SENTIENTS. PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR IMMEDIATE TRANSFER TO THE EARTH-HUMAN PRELIMINARY TRAINING SCHOOL ON FOMALHAUT THREE.
Chapter 4
BY the time they had reached the final stages of their training on Fomalhaut Three they were eleven Earth-years older and, thanks to the advanced medical science available, they looked and felt at least that much younger. Several times Martin had asked by how much their life spans had been extended, but that was one of the questions which their supervisor refused to answer, saying that if they did not complete their training to its satisfaction they were likely to end their lives prematurely in some stupid and avoidable accident, so that giving them information regarding their probable life expectancies would serve no useful purpose.
They were now in possession of the knowledge and ability to control and direct mechanisms of a complexity and power undreamed of by the people they had been on Earth-although they had still, their superior insisted, to acquire the experience and wisdom to use this power effectively. So they had waited and trained to an even finer pitch, wondering when, if ever, their first assignment would come.
Due to training commitments, their original classmates and one-time friends had gradually drawn away from them to disappear, two by two, in the directions of their chosen specialties. But there were compensations. As the training programs of Martin and Beth, the woman he had seen during that final visit to the examination and induction center
back on Earth, began increasingly to overlap, and their friends to move away, Beth and he had drawn-or had they been forced? — closer.
It was a disturbing thought, particularly when, as now, it returned to trouble both of them at the same time. Martin slipped his arm around Beth’s shoulders and drew her back into the relaxer which, as well as being sinfully soft, was set for one-quarter gee. But her arm and neck muscles were stiff with tension, and she was wearing her totally unnecessary spectacles, which was not a good sign.
“How much does that slimy, supercilious supervisor know about us?” she asked, so softly that she might have been speaking to herself. “Was a few hours with the interrogation robots at the induction center enough to tell it everything! And if it knows everything, how accurately can it predict our behavior? Have we any free will, any choices? More importantly, have you, had you, any choice at all?”
“We can always choose to fail the next test,” Martin said, in an attempt to change the subject. “But it might well be that, in our situation, teacher knows best.”
“It knows us well enough to know that we wouldn’t deliberately fail a test,” Beth said impatiently. “And you know what I mean. We had no choice, no competition, no chance to make comparisons. I know that you were, well, impressed by Kathy. She impressed hell out of all the men, she’s gorgeous, dammit. If things had been different you might have preferred…”
Looking miserable, she left the sentence hanging.
Martin gave her shoulders another sympathetic squeeze, trying to draw her closer. But the warm, yielding, and normally responsive body had become that of a cold, fleshy mannequin with tension-frozen joints. He sighed, remembering that during their first meeting in the induction center so long ago, before he had even learned her name, he had decided that she was a lovely and highly intelligent young woman who took things much too seriously.
He had found no reason to change his mind about her when they met in the spacious living module occupied by the school’s Earth-humans, or during recreation periods in the forests and lakes overlying that tremendous underground training complex. Fomalhaut Three provided an environment suited to the needs of many of the Galaxy’s warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing races, and much of its training and large-scale simulation equipment was hi common use. But none of the trainees, including Martin, were allowed to make contact with a member of another species until they had graduated from the school.
He and Beth had met more and more frequently as their chosen specialties required them to share training simulations of increasing complexity, duration, and degrees of risk. She, who once had been responsible for the computer control of traffic in a small Earth city, and who was now able to direct energies and engines capable of changing the topography of a continent; and he, a cynical, discontented, one-time lecturer in zoology who, it seemed, was destined to do little else but talk. He shook his head and brought his mind back to the present time and problem.
“You’re forgetting,” he said quietly, “that the only one of us to impress Kathy was George. George with the muscles, and mustache, and the teeth. Did you fancy…”
“No,” she said firmly. “Kathy is welcome to him.”
“Besides,” he went on, “they’re both specializing in multi-environmental plant and animal husbandry. Fine, demanding, vitally important work, no doubt, especially if they want to stay inside the World, but it is still only fanning. Teaming up with a ship handler, the class’s only trainee hypership captain, no less, is much more fun. For personal as well as professional reasons.”
Beth did not smile as she turned her head to look at him, and her eyes were hidden by light reflection in her spectacles.
He went on. “It is quite possible that the supervisor knows our minds much better than we do, and that would include being able to predict what we are likely to do in any given situation. But what of it? That creature is hyperintelligent, not omniscient, and I think that its thought processes are just too alien for it to be able to influence us against our wills where anything so subtle as Earth-human emotional relationships are concerned. The decisions we made, and will make, are still our own, regardless of the fact that it probably knows about them in advance. The point I’m trying to make is that, had the supervisor given you more female competition by confronting me with a dozen, or a hundred, tall, dark-eyed, lovely women who know what I’m thinking almost before I do, the process would have taken much longer, and wasted a lot of our supervisor’s precious training time, but ultimately I would have made the same choice.”
He felt her relax, but not completely, as she allowed herself to settle into the backrest beside him.
“If I had been confronted with a hundred men..” she began.
“I was lucky you weren’t,” he said.
Irritably, she said, “How can I argue with you when you always say the right thing? But I keep forgetting that you’re training as one of those devious-minded, smooth-talking specialists in First Contact who never stops practicing…”
“This,” he reminded her gently, “is not the first contact.”
There was a small movement of her shoulder, and he felt her hand creep gently into his and grip the fingers tightly, and he knew that she, too, was remembering that first contact and all the tension and terror of the protracted, technological nightmare that had preceded it.
It had happened during one of their early shared training exercises, when they were still trying to familiarize themselves with what the supervisor, a being renowned for the magnitude of its understatements, referred to as the basic tools of the trade.
The tools of their trade…
Tool One, the hypership: the largest general-purpose vessel operated by the Galactics; just under half a mile in length, one-third that at its widest point, bristling with such an angular, metallic outgrowth of hyper-drive generator assemblies, normal-space drivers, tractor and pressor beam projectors, weather control machinery, and long- and short-range sensors that it was incapable of making anything but the most catastrophic of crash landings on a planetary surface. Internally it was packed with enough power generation equipment to satisfy the demands of one of the Galactic’s most energy-hungry cities, as well as a small army of monitor and self-repair robots, fabrication modules capable of producing anything from a pair of boots to a medium-sized interplanetary space vessel, synthesizers for the crew’s organic consumables, and, in executive charge of ail these systems, a computer which, to describe it as superhuman would have been to damn it with faint praise indeed. In spite of its virtual omniscience, the main computer was subservient to the wishes of its organic crew, although not always without argument.
This was one of the Galactics’ standard-issue tools, varying from ship to ship only in the control interfaces, living quarters, medical support, and food and translation systems required by its organic occupants at the time.
Tool Two, the lander: a small, fast, low-level reconnaissance vessel and surface lander, with crew positions for two but capable of being controlled remotely by the mother ship. Designed as a secure base for the First Contact specialist, it carried the full spectrum of communications equipment and, in the event of the contact going sour, its meteorite screen was also capable of protecting the occupant from ground or air attack by anything short of nuclear weapons.
Tool Three, the protector: a small, surface observation vehicle capable of operating within the most hostile of environments while enabling its crew to communicate with any intelligent inhabitants who might be present. For defense it relied principally on high mobility, but in the event of it encountering a threat from which it could not run away and which threatened the life of an organic occupant, it had power sufficient for a short-range matter transmission link with either the lander or the hyper-ship.
The other tools were much smaller, more specialized, and tailored to the needs of the Earth-human life-form. These included mobile, self-powered protective envelopes, proof against any hostile environment they were likely to encounter; a variety o
f nonlethal or psychological weaponry; and a two-way translator terminal so small that it could be disguised as a piece of ear or neck jewelry, and possessing a silent voice-bypass facility which enabled the contacter to hold simultaneous conversation with the mother ship without the risk of giving offense to an alien contactee.
But in that first major test, given without prior warning during the start of an otherwise routine training exercise to power-up a cold lander, the majority of those increasingly familiar tools were deliberately withdrawn from use.
It was a simulated, near-catastrophic malfunction which had opened the hypership to space and taken out the on-board power generation and all of the systems controlled by the main computer. They protested, reminding the supervisor that they had been taught that the hypership’s design philosophy made such an event impossible. But they were told that it was a simulated and not a real event, that it was designed to test, under conditions of extreme stress, their suitability for their chosen specialties, and that if they put into practice everything they had been taught up until that time, they should be able to survive the test without serious damage or life termination.
Within seconds of the first malfunction alarm, the lander’s hull sensors reacted automatically to the loss of external pressure and simulated radiation build-up by sealing all entry and inspection ports, effectively trapping them in a ship within a ship.
Considering then- level of technological ignorance at the time, it was obvious that they could not do anything about the condition of the distressed hypership, so that the most that was expected of them was to act as they would have done had the situation been real, and call for help.
But the distress beacon was mounted outside the hypership’s hull, and they were trapped inside a lander whose power cells and consumables were all but depleted. A hurried inventory showed that they had enough energy to maintain an air supply for two people of thirty-six hours, provided they remained at rest and did not use the available power for light, heat, artificial gravity, or communication with anyone or anything outside the lander.
