Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  Before Lee could reply, Lou D’Orazio—the ship’s geophysicist and cartographer—came bounding through the hatchway of the rec room and, taking advantage of the half-gravity, crossed to their chess table in two jumps.

  “Look at this!”

  He slapped a still-warm photograph on the chess table, scattering pieces over the floor. Charnovsky swore something Slavic, and everyone in the room turned.

  It was one of the regular cartographic photos, crisscrossed with grid lines. It showed the shoreline of one of the planet’s mini-oceans. A line of steep bluffs followed the shore.

  “It looks like an ordinary …”

  “Aspetti un momento … wait a minute … see here.” D’Orazio pulled a magnifier from his coverall pocket. “Look!”

  Lee peered through the magnifier. Fuzzy, wavering, gray …

  “It looks like—”

  Lehman said, “Whatever it is, it’s standing on two legs.”

  “It’s a man,” Charnovsky said flatly.

  II

  Within minutes the whole scientific staff had piled into the rec room and crowded around the table, together with all the crew members except the two on duty in the command globe. The ship’s automatic cameras took twenty more photograph of the area before their orbit carried them over the horizon from the spot.

  Five of the pictures showed the shadowy figure of a bipedal creature.

  The spot was in darkness by the time their orbit carried them over it again. Infrared and radar sensors showed nothing.

  They squinted at the pictures, handed them from person to person, talked and argued and wondered through two entire eight-hour shifts. Crewmen left for duty and returned again. The planet turned beneath them, and once again the shoreline was bathed in Sirius’s hot glow. But there was no trace of the humanoid. Neither the cameras, the manned telescopes, nor the other sensors could spot anything.

  One by one, men and women left the rec room, sleepy and talked out. Finally, only Lee, Charnovsky, Lehman, and Captain Rassmussen were left sitting at the chess table with the finger-grimed photos spread out before them.

  “They’re men,” Lee murmured. “Erect, bipedal men.”

  “It’s only one creature,” the captain said. “And all we know is that it looks like a man.”

  Rassmussen was tall, ham-fisted, rawboned, with a ruddy face that could look either elfin or Viking but nothing in between. His voice, though, was thin and high. To the everlasting applause of all aboard, he had fought to get a five-year supply of beer brought along. Even now, he had a mug tightly wrapped in one big hand.

  “All right, they’re humanoids,” Lee conceded. “That’s close enough.”

  The captain hiked a shaggy eyebrow. “I don’t like jumping at shadows, you know. These pictures—”

  “Men or not,” Charnovsky said, “we must land and investigate closely.”

  Lee glanced at Lehman, straddling a turned-around chair and resting his arms tiredly on the back.

  “Oh, we’ll investigate,” Rassmussen agreed, “but not too fast. If they are an intelligent species of some kind, we’ve got to go gingerly. I’m under orders from the Council, you know.”

  “They haven’t tried to contact us,” Lee said. “That means they either don’t know we’re here, or they’re not interested, or—”

  “Or what?”

  Lee knew how it would sound, but he said it anyway. “Or they’re waiting to get their hands on us.”

  Rassmussen laughed. “That sounds dramatic, sure enough.”

  “Really?” Lee heard his voice as though it were someone else’s. “Suppose the humanoids down there are from the same race that built the machines on Titan?”

  “Nonsense,” Charnovsky blurted. “There are no cities down there, no sign whatever of an advanced civilization.”

  The captain took a long swallow of beer; then, “There is no sign of Earth’s civilization on the planet either, you know. Yet we are here, sure enough.”

  Lee’s insides were fluttering now. “If they are the ones who built on Titan …”

  “It is still nonsense!” Charnovsky insisted. “To assume that the first extraterrestrial creature resembling a man is a representative of the race that visited the solar system hundreds of centuries ago … ridiculous! The statistics alone put the idea in the realm of fantasy.”

  “Wait, there’s more to it,” Lee said. “Why would a visitor from another star go to the trouble to build a machine that works for centuries, without stopping?”

  They looked at him, waiting for him to answer his own question: Rassmussen with his Viking’s craggy face, Charnovsky trying to puzzle it out in his own mind, Lehman calm and half amused.

  “The Titan buildings are more than alien,” Lee explained. “They’re hostile. That’s my belief. Call it an assumption, a hypothesis. But I can’t envision an alien race building machinery like that except for an all-important purpose. That purpose was military.”

  Rassmussen looked truly puzzled now. “Military? But who were they fighting?”

  “Us,” Lee answered. “A previous civilization on Earth. A culture that arose before the Ice Ages, went into space, met an alien culture, and was smashed in a war so badly that there’s no trace of it left.”

  Charnovsky’s face was reddening with the effort of staying quiet.

  “I know it’s conjecture,” Lee went on quietly, “but if there was a war between ancient man and the builders of the Titan machines, then the two cultures must have arisen close enough to each other to make war possible. Widely separated cultures can’t make war, they can only contact each other every few centuries or millennia. The aliens had to come from a nearby star … like Sirius.”

  “No, no, no!” Charnovsky slapped a hand on his thigh. “It’s preposterous, unscientific! There is not one shred of evidence to support this, this … pipe dream!”

  But Rassmussen looked thoughtful.

  “Still …”

  “Still, it is nonsense,” Charnovsky repeated. “The planet down there holds no interstellar technology. If there ever was one, it was blasted away when Sirius B exploded. Whoever is down there, he has no cities, no electronic communications, no satellites in orbit, no cultivated fields, no animal herds … nothing!”

  “Then maybe he’s a visitor, too,” Lee countered.

  “Whatever it is,” Rassmussen said, “it won’t do for us to go rushing in like berserkers. Suppose there’s a civilization down there that’s so advanced we simply do not recognize it as such?”

  Before Charnovsky could reply, the captain went on, “We have plenty of time. We will get more data about surface conditions from the robot landers and do a good deal more studying and thinking about the entire problem. Then, if conditions warrant it, we can land.”

  “But we don’t have time!” Lee snapped. Surprised at his own vehemence, he continued, “Five years is a grain of sand compared to the job ahead of us. We have to investigate a completely alien culture and determine what its attitude is toward us. Just learning the language might take five years all by itself.”

  Lehman smiled easily and said, “Sid, suppose you’re totally wrong about this, and whoever’s down there is simply a harmless savage. What would be the shock to his culture if we suddenly drop in on him?”

  “What’ll be the shock to our culture if I’m right?”

  Rassmussen drained his mug and banged it down on the chess table. “This is getting us nowhere. We have not enough evidence to decide on an intelligent course of action. Personally, I’m in no hurry to go blundering into a nest of unknowns. Not when we can learn safely from orbit. As long as the beer holds out, we go slow.”

  Lee pushed his chair back and stood up. “We won’t learn a damned thing from orbit. Not anything that counts. We’ve got to go down there and study them close up. And the sooner the better.”

  He turned and walked out of the rec room. Rassmussen’s spent half his life hauling scientists out to Titan, and he can’t understand why we have to m
ake the most of our time here, he raged to himself.

  Halfway down the passageway to his quarters, he heard footsteps padding behind him. He knew who it would be. Turning, he saw Lehman coming along toward him.

  “Sacking in?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “Aren’t you sleepy?”

  “Completely bushed, now that you mention it.”

  “But you want to talk to me,” Lee said.

  Lehman shrugged. “No hurry.”

  With a shrug of his own, Lee resumed walking to his room. “Come on. I’m too worked up to sleep anyway.”

  All the cubicles were more or less the same: a bunk, a desk, a filmspool reader, a sanitary closet. Lee took the webbed desk chair and let Lehman plop on the sighing air mattress of the bunk.

  “Do you really believe this hostile-alien theory? Or are you just—”

  Lee slouched down in his chair and interrupted. “Let’s not fool around, Rich. You know about my breakdown on Titan and you’re worried about me.”

  “It’s my job to worry about everybody.”

  “I take my pills every day … to keep the paranoia away.”

  “That wasn’t the diagnosis of your case, as you’re perfectly well aware.”

  “So they called it something else. What’re you after, Rich? Want to test my reflexes while I’m sleepy and my guard’s down?”

  Lehman smiled professionally. “Look, Sid. You had a breakdown on Titan. You got over it. That’s finished.”

  Nodding grimly, Lee added, “Except that I think there might be aliens down there plotting against me.”

  “That could be nothing more than a subconscious attempt to increase the importance of the Anthropology Department,” Lehman countered.

  “Crap,” Lee said. “I came out here expecting something like this. Why do you think I fought my way onto this expedition? It wasn’t easy, after my breakdown. I had to push ahead of a lot of former friends.”

  “And leave your wife.”

  “That’s right. Ruth divorced me for it. She’s getting all my accumulated dividends. She’ll die in comfort while we’re sleeping our way back home.”

  “But why?” Lehman asked. “Why should you give up everything—friends, wife, family, position—to get out here?”

  Lee knew the answer, hesitated about putting it into words, then realized that Lehman knew it, too. “Because I had to face it … had to do what I could to find out about those buildings on Titan.”

  “And that’s why you want to rush down and contact whoever it is down there? Am I right?”

  “Right,” Lee said. He almost wanted to laugh. “I’m hoping they can tell me if I’m crazy or not.”

  III

  It was three months before they landed.

  Rassmussen was thorough, patient, and stubborn. Unmanned landers sampled and tested surface conditions. Observation satellites crisscrossed the planet at the lowest possible altitudes—except for one thing that hung in synchronous orbit in the longitude of the spot where the first humanoid had been found.

  That was the only place where humanoid life was seen, along that shoreline for a grand distance of perhaps five kilometers. Nowhere else on the planet.

  Lee argued and swore and stormed at the delay. Rassmussen stayed firm. Only when he was satisfied that nothing more could be learned from orbit did he agree to land the ship. And still he sent clear word back toward Earth that he might be landing in a trap.

  The great ship settled slowly, almost delicately, on a hot tongue of fusion flame, and touched down on the western edge of a desert some two hundred kilometers from the humanoid site. A range of rugged-looking hills separated them. The staff and crew celebrated that night. The next morning, Lee, Charnovsky, Hatfield, Doris McNertny, Marlene Ettinger, and Alicia Monteverdi moved to the ship’s “Sirius globe.” They were to be the expedition’s “outsiders,” the specialists who would eventually live in the planetary environment. They represented anthropology, geology, biochemistry, botany, zoology, and ecology, with backup specialties in archaeology, chemistry, and paleontology.

  The Sirius globe held their laboratories, workrooms, equipment, and living quarters. They were quarantined from the rest of the ship’s staff and crew, the “insiders,” until the captain agreed that the surface conditions on the planet would be no threat to the rest of the expedition members. That would take two years minimum, Lee knew.

  Gradually, the “outsiders” began to expose themselves to the local environment. They began to breathe the air, acquire the microbes. Pascual and Tanaka made them sit in the medical examination booths twice a day, and even checked them personally every other day. The two M.D.s wore disposable biosuits and worried expressions when they entered the Sirius globe. The medical computers compiled miles of data tapes on each of the six “outsiders,” but still Pascual’s normally pleasant face acquired a perpetual frown of anxiety about them.

  “I just don’t like the idea of this damned armor,” Lee grumbled.

  He was already encased up to his neck in a gleaming white powersuit, the type that crew members wore when working outside the ship in a vacuum. Aaron Hatfield and Marlene Ettinger were helping to check all the seams and connections. A few feet away, in the cramped “locker room,” tiny Alicia Monteverdi looked as though she were being swallowed by an oversized automaton; Charnovsky and Doris McNertny were checking her suit.

  “It’s for your own protection,” Marlene told Lee in a throaty whisper as she applied a test meter to the radio panel on his suit’s chest. “You and Alicia won the toss for the first trip outside, but this is the price you must pay. Now be a good boy and don’t complain.”

  Lee had to grin. “Ja, Fräulein Schulmeisterin.”

  She looked up at him with a rueful smile. “Thank God you never had to carry on a conversation in German.”

  Finally Lee and Alicia clumped through the double hatch into the air lock. It took another fifteen minutes for them to perform the final checkout, but at last they were ready. The outer hatch slid back, and they started down the long ladder to the planet’s surface. The armored suits were equipped with muscle-amplifying power systems, so that even a girl as slim as Alicia could handle their bulk easily.

  Lee went down the ladder first and set foot on the ground. It was bare and dusty, the sky a reddish haze.

  The grand adventure, Lee thought. All the expected big moments in life are flops. A hot breeze hummed in his earphones. It was early morning. Sirius had not cleared the barren horizon yet, although the sky was fully bright. Despite the suit’s air-conditioning, Lee felt the heat.

  He reached up a hand as Alicia climbed warily down the last few steps of the ladder. The plastic rungs gave under the suit’s weight, then slowly straightened themselves when the weight was removed.

  “Well,” he said, looking at her wide-eyed face through the transparent helmet of her suit, “what do you think of it?”

  “It is hardly paradise, is it?”

  “Looks like it’s leaning the other way,” Lee said.

  They explored—Lee and Alicia that first day, then the other outsiders, shuffling ponderously inside their armor. Lee chafed against the restriction of the powersuits, but Rassmussen insisted and would brook no argument. They went timidly at first, never out of sight of the ship. Charnovsky chipped samples from the rock outcroppings, while the others took air and soil samples, dug for water, searched for life.

  “The perfect landing site,” Doris complained after a hot, tedious day. “There’s no form of life bigger than a yeast mold within a hundred kilometers of here.”

  It was a hot world, a dry world, a brick-dust world, where the sky was always red. Sirius was a blowtorch searing down on them, too bright to look at even through the tinted visors of their suits. At night there was no moon to see, but the Pup bathed this world in a deathly bluish glow far brighter yet colder than moonlight. The night sky was never truly dark, and only a few strong stars could be seen from the ground.

  Through it all, the robot
satellites relayed more pictures of the humanoids along the seacoast. They appeared almost every day, usually only briefly. Sometimes there were a few of them, sometimes only one, once there were nearly a dozen. The highest-resolution photographs showed them to be human in size and build. But what their faces looked like, what they wore, what they were doing—all escaped the drone cameras.

  The robot landers, spotted in a dozen scattered locations within a thousand kilometers of the ship, faithfully recorded and transmitted everything they were programmed to look for. They sent pictures and chemical analyses of plant life and insects. But no higher animals.

  Alicia’s dark-eyed face took on a perpetually puzzled frown, Lee saw. “It makes no sense,” she would say. “There is nothing on this planet more advanced than insects … yet there are men. It’s as though humans suddenly sprang up in the Silurian period on Earth. They can’t be here. I wish we could examine the life in the seas … perhaps that would tell us more.”

  “You mean those humanoids didn’t originate on this planet?” Lee said to her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t see how they could have …”

  IV

  Gradually they pushed their explorations farther afield, beyond the ship’s limited horizon. In the motorized powersuits a man could cover more than a hundred kilometers a day, if he pushed it. Lee always headed toward the grizzled hills that separated them from the seacoast. He helped the others to dig, to collect samples, but he always pointed them toward the sea.

  “The satellite pictures show some decent greenery on the seaward side of the hills,” he told Doris. “That’s where he should go.”

  Rassmussen wouldn’t move the ship. He wanted his base of operations, his link homeward, at least a hundred kilometers from the nearest possible threat. But finally he relaxed enough to allow the scientists to go out overnight and take a look at the hills.

  And maybe the coast, Lee added silently to the captain’s orders.