Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  “Until what?” Hatfield said.

  “Until I go out there and meet them face-to-face, learn their language, their culture, live with them.”

  “Live with them?” Rassmussen looked startled; the first time Lee had seen him jarred. The captain’s monomolecular biosuit gave his craggy face a faint sheen, like the beginnings of a sweat.

  They were sitting around a circular table in the conference room of the Sirius globe: the six “outsiders,” Grote, Chien, Captain Rassmussen, Pascual, and Lehman.

  “Aren’t you afraid they might put you in a pot and boil you?” Grote asked, grinning.

  “I don’t think they have pots. Or fire, for that matter,” Lee countered.

  The laugh turned on Grote.

  Lee went on quietly, “I’ve checked it out with Aaron, here. There’s no biochemical reason why I couldn’t survive in the native environment. Doris and Marlene have agreed to gather the same types of food we’ve seen the humanoids carrying, and I’ll go on a strictly native diet for a few weeks before I go to live with them.”

  Lehman hunched forward, from across the table, and asked Lee, “About the dynamics of having a representative of our relatively advanced culture step into their primitive—”

  “I won’t be representing an advanced culture to them,” Lee said. “I intend to be just as naked and toolless as they are. And just as black. Aaron can inject me with the proper enzymes to turn my skin black.”

  “That would be necessary in any event if you don’t want to be sunburned to death,” Pascual said.

  Hatfield added, “You’ll also need contact lenses that’ll screen out the UV and protect your eyes.”

  They spent an hour discussing all the physical precautions he would have to take. Lee kept glancing at Rassmussen. The idea’s slipping out from under his control. The captain watched each speaker in turn, squinting with concentration and sinking deeper and deeper into his Viking scowl. Then, when Lee was certain that the captain could no longer object, Rassmussen spoke up: “One more question. Are you willing to give up an eye for this mission of yours?”

  “What do you mean?”

  The captain’s hands seemed to wander loosely without a mug of beer to tie them down. “Well … you seem to be willing to run a good deal of personal risk to live with these … eh, people. From the expedition’s viewpoint, you will also be risking our only anthropologist, you know. I think the wise thing to do, in that case, would be to have a running record of everything you see and hear.”

  Lee nodded.

  “So we can swap one of your eyes for a TV camera and plant a transmitter somewhere in your skull. I’m sure there’s enough empty space in your head to accommodate it.” The captain chuckled toothily at his joke.

  “We can’t do an eye procedure here,” Pascual argued. “It’s too risky.”

  “I understand that Dr. Tanaka is quite expert in that field,” the captain said. “And naturally we would preserve the eye to restore it afterward. Unless, of course, Professor Lee—” He let the suggestion dangle.

  Lee looked at them sitting around the big table; Rassmussen, trying to look noncommittal; Pascual, upset and nearly angry; Lehman, staring intently right back into Lee’s eyes.

  You’re just trying to force me to back down, Lee thought of Rassmussen. Then, of Lehman, And if I don’t back down, you’ll be convinced that I’m crazy.

  For a long moment there was no sound in the crowded conference room except the faint whir of the air blower.

  “All right,” Lee said. “If Tanaka is willing to tackle the surgery, so am I.”

  VII

  When Lee returned to his cubicle, the message light under the phone screen was blinking red. He flopped on the bunk, propped a pillow under his head, and asked the computer, “What’s the phone message?”

  The screen lit up: PLS CALL DR. LEHMAN.

  My son, the psychiatrist. “Okay,” he said aloud, “get him.”

  A moment later Lehman’s tanned face filled the screen.

  “I was expecting you to call,” Lee said.

  The psychiatrist nodded. “You agreed to pay a big price just to get loose among the natives.”

  “Tanaka can handle the surgery,” he answered evenly.

  “It’ll take a month before you are fit to leave the ship again.”

  “You know what our Viking captain says … we’ll stay here as long as the beer holds out.”

  Lehman smiled. Professional technique, Lee thought.

  “Sid, do you really think you can mingle with these people without causing any cultural impact? Without changing them?”

  Shrugging, he answered, “I don’t know. I hope so. As far as we know, they’re the only humanoid group on the planet. They may have never seen a stranger before.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Lehman said. “Don’t you feel that—”

  “Let’s cut the circling, Rich. You know why I want to see them firsthand. If we had the time I’d study them remotely for a good long while before trying any contact. But it gets back to the beer supply. We’ve got to squeeze everything we can out of them in a little more than four years.”

  “There will be other expeditions, after we return to Earth and tell them about these people.”

  “Probably so. But they may be too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  His neck was starting to hurt; Lee hunched up to a sitting position on the bunk. “Figure it out. There can’t be more than about fifty people in the group we’ve been watching. I’ve only seen a couple of children. And there aren’t any other humanoid groups on the planet. That means they’re dying out. This gang is the last of their kind. By the time another expedition gets here, there might not be any of them left.”

  For once, Lehman looked surprised. “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes. And before they die, we have to get some information out of them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They might not be natives of this planet,” Lee said, forcing himself to speak calmly, keeping his face a mask, freezing any emotion inside him. “They probably came from somewhere else. That elsewhere is the home of the people who built the Titan machine … their real home. We have got to find out where it is.” Flawless logic.

  Lehman tried to smile again. “That’s assuming your theory about an ancient war is right.”

  “Yes. Assuming I’m right.”

  “Assume you are,” Lehman said. “And assume you find what you’re looking for. Then what? Do you just take off and go back to Earth? What happens to the people here?”

  “I don’t know,” Lee said, ice-cold inside. “The main problem will be how to deal with the home world of their people.”

  “But the people here, do we just let them die out?”

  “Maybe. I guess so.”

  Lehman’s smile was completely gone now; his face didn’t look pleasant at all.

  It took much more than a month. The surgery was difficult. And beneath all the pain was Lee’s rooted fear that he might never have his sight fully restored again. While he was recovering, before he was allowed out of his infirmary bed, Hatfield turned his skin black with a series of enzyme injections. He was also fitted for a single quartz contact lens.

  Once he was up and around, Marlene followed him constantly. Finally she said, “You’re even better looking with black skin; it makes you more mysterious. And the prosthetic eye looks exactly like your own. It even moves like the natural one.”

  Rassmussen still plodded. Long after he felt strong enough to get going again, he was still confined to the ship. When his complaints grew loud enough, they let him start on a diet of native foods. The medics and Hatfield hovered around him while he spent a miserable week with dysentery. Then it passed. But it took a while to build up his strength again; all he had to eat now were fish, insects, and pulpy greens.

  After more tests, conferences, a two-week trial run out by the Glass Mountains, and then still more exhaustive physical exams, Rassmus
sen at last agreed to let Lee go.

  Grote took him out in the skimmer, skirting the long way around the Glass Mountains, through the surf and out onto the gently billowing sea. They kept far enough out at sea for the beach to be constantly beyond their horizon.

  When night fell, Grote nosed the skimmer landward. They came ashore around midnight, with the engines clamped down to near silence, a few kilometers up the beach from the humanoids’ site. Grote, encased in a powersuit, walked with him partway and buried a relay transceiver in the sand, to pick up the signals from the camera and radio embedded in Lee’s skull.

  “Good luck.” His voice was muffled by the helmet.

  Lee watched him plod mechanically back into the darkness. He strained to hear the skimmer as it turned and slipped back into the sea, but he could neither see nor hear it.

  He was alone on the beach.

  Clouds were drifting landward, riding smoothly overhead. The breeze on the beach, though, was blowing warmly out of the desert, spilling over the bluffs and across the beach, out to sea. The sky was bright with the all-night twilight glow, even though the clouds blotted out most of the stars. Along the foot of the cliffs, though, it was deep black. Except for the wind, there wasn’t a sound: not a bird nor a nocturnal cat, not even an insect’s chirrup.

  Lee stayed near the water’s edge. He wasn’t cold, even though naked. Still, he could feel himself trembling.

  Grote’s out there, he told himself. If you need him, he can come rolling up the beach in ten minutes.

  But he knew he was alone.

  The clouds thickened and began to sprinkle rain, a warm, soft shower. Lee blinked the drops away from his eyes and walked slowly, a hundred paces one direction, then a hundred paces back again.

  The rain stopped as the sea horizon started turning bright. The clouds wafted away. The sky lightened, first gray, then almost milky white. Lee looked toward the base of the cliffs. Dark shadows dotted the rugged cliff face. Caves. Some of them were ten feet or more above the sand.

  Sirius edged a limb above the horizon, and Lee, squinting, turned away from its brilliance. He looked back at the caves again, feeling the warmth of the hot star’s might on his back.

  The first ones out of the cave were two children. They tumbled out of the same cave, off to Lee’s left, giggling and running.

  When they saw Lee, they stopped dead. As though someone had turned them off. Lee could feel his heart beating as they stared at him. He stood just as still as they did, perhaps a hundred meters from them. They looked about five and ten years old, he judged. If their life spans are the same as ours.

  The taller of the two boys took a step toward Lee, then turned and ran back into the cave. The younger boy followed him.

  For several minutes nothing happened. Then Lee heard voices echoing from inside the cave. Angry? Frightened? They are not laughing.

  Four men appeared at the mouth of the cave. Their hands were empty. They simply stood there and gaped at him, from the shadows of the cave’s mouth.

  Now we’ll start learning their customs about strangers, Lee said to himself.

  Very deliberately, he turned away from them and took a few steps up the beach. Then he stopped, turned again, and walked back to his original spot.

  Two of the men disappeared inside the cave. The other two stood there. Lee couldn’t tell what the expressions on their faces meant. Suddenly other people appeared at a few of the other cave entrances. They’re interconnected.

  Lee tried a smile and waved. There were women among the onlookers now, and a few children. One of the boys who saw him first—at least, it looked like him—started chattering to an adult. The man silenced him with a brusque gesture.

  It was getting hot. Lee could feel perspiration dripping along his ribs as Sirius climbed above the horizon and shone straight at the cliffs. Slowly, he squatted down on the sand.

  A few of the men from the first cave stepped out onto the beach. Two of them were carrying bone spears. Others edged out from their caves. They slowly drew together, keeping close to the rocky cliff wall, and started talking in low, earnest tones.

  They’re puzzled, all right. Just play it cool. Don’t make any sudden moves.

  He leaned forward slightly and traced a triangle on the sand with one finger.

  When he looked up again, a grizzled, white-haired man had taken a step or two away from the conference group. Lee smiled at him, and the elder froze in his tracks. With a shrug, Lee looked back at the first cave. The boy was still there, with a woman standing beside him, gripping his shoulder. Lee waved and smiled. The boy’s hand fluttered momentarily.

  The old man said something to the group, and one of the younger men stepped out to join him. Neither held a weapon. They walked to within a few meters of Lee, and the old man said something, as loudly and bravely as he could.

  Lee bowed his head. “Good morning. I am Professor Sidney Lee of the University of Ottawa, which is one hell of a long way from here.”

  They squatted down and started talking, both of them at once, pointing to the caves and then all around the beach and finally out to the sea.

  Lee held up his hands and said, “It ought to be clear to you that I’m from someplace else, and I don’t speak your language. Now if you want to start teaching me—”

  They shook their heads, talked to each other, said something else to Lee.

  Lee smiled at them and waited for them to stop talking. When they did, he pointed to himself and said very clearly, “Lee.”

  He spent an hour at it, repeating only that one syllable, no matter what they said to him or to each other. The heat was getting fierce; Sirius was a blue flame searing his skin, baking the juices out of him.

  The younger man got up and, with a shake of his head, spoke a few final words to the elder and walked back to the group that still stood knotted by the base of the cliff. The old man rose, slowly and stiffly. He beckoned to Lee to do the same.

  As Lee got to his feet he saw the other men start to head out for the surf. A few boys followed behind, carrying several bone spears for their—what? Fathers? Older brothers?

  As long as the spears are for the fish and not me, Lee thought.

  The old man was saying something to him. Pointing toward the caves. He took a step in that direction, then motioned for Lee to come along. Lee hesitated. The old man smiled a toothless smile and repeated his invitation.

  Grinning back at him in realization, Lee said aloud, “Okay. If you’re not scared of me, I guess I don’t have to be scared of you.”

  VIII

  It took more than a year before Lee learned their language well enough to understand roughly what they were saying. It was an odd language, sparse and practically devoid of pronouns.

  His speaking of their words made the adults smile, when they thought he couldn’t see them doing it. The children still giggled at his speech, but the old man —Ardraka—always scolded them when they did.

  They called the planet Makta, and Lee saw to it that Rassmussen entered that as its official name in the expedition’s log. He made a point of walking the beach alone one night each week, to talk with the others at the ship and make a personal report. He quickly found that most of what he saw, heard, and said inside the caves never got out to the relay transceiver buried up the beach; the cliff’s rock walls were too much of a barrier.

  Ardraka was the oldest of the clan and the nominal chief. His son, Ardra, was the younger man who had also come out to talk with Lee that first day. Ardra actually gave most of the orders. Ardraka could overrule him whenever he chose to, but he seldom exercised the right.

  There were only forty-three people in the clan, nearly half of them elderly looking. Eleven were preadolescent children; two of them infants. There were no obvious pregnancies. Ardraka must have been about fifty, judging by his oldest son’s apparent age. But the old man had the wrinkled, sunken look of an eighty-year-old. The people themselves had very little idea of time beyond the basic rhythm of night and
day.

  They came out of the caves only during the early morning and evening hours. The blazing midday heat of Sirius was too much for them to face. They ate crustaceans and the small fish that dwelt in the shallows along the beach, insects, and the grubby vegetation that clung to the base of the cliffs. Occasionally they found a large fish that had blundered into the shallows; then they feasted.

  They had no wood, no metal, no fire. Their only tools were from the precious bones of the rare big fish, and hand-worked rock.

  They died of disease and injury, and aged prematurely from poor diet and overwork. They had to search constantly for food, especially since half their day was taken away from them by Sirius’s blowtorch heat. They were more apt to be prowling the beach at night, hunting seaworms and crabs, than by daylight. Grote and I damn near barged right into them, Lee realized after watching a few of the night gathering sessions.

  There were some dangers. One morning he was watching one of the teenaged boys, a good swimmer, venture out past the shallows in search of fish. A sharklike creature found him first.

  When he screamed, half a dozen men grabbed spears and dove into the surf. Lee found himself dashing into the water alongside them, emptyhanded. He swam out to the youngster, already dead, sprawled facedown in the water, half of him gone, blood staining the swells. Lee helped to pull the remains back to shore.

  There wasn’t anything definite, no one said a word to him about it, but their attitude toward him changed. He was fully accepted now. He hadn’t saved the boy’s life, hadn’t shown uncommon bravery. But he had shared a danger with them, and a sorrow.

  Wheel the horse inside the gates of Troy, Lee found himself thinking. Nobody ever told you to beware of men bearing gifts.

  After he got to really understand their language, Lee found that Ardraka often singled him out for long talks. It was almost funny. There was something that the old man was fishing for, just as Lee was trying to learn where these people really came from.