Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  Lee nodded agreement.

  Pascual and Tanaka spent more than an hour seeping the mildest soporific they knew of through the sleeping cave. Lee fidgeted outside on the beach, in the rain, waiting for them to finish. When Tanaka finally told them it was safe to go through, he hurried past the sprawled bodies, scarcely seeing Pascual —still inside his cumbersome suit—patiently recording medical analyses of each individual.

  Even with the suit lamps to light the corridors, it was hard to retrace his steps down to the lowest level of the ancient shelter. But when he got to the storeroom, Lee heard Stek break into a long string of Polish exultation at the sight of the artifacts.

  The three suited figures holographed, X-rayed, took radiation counts, measured, weighed, every piece on the ancient shelves. They touched nothing directly, but lifted each piece with loving tenderness in a portable magnetic grapple.

  “This one,” Stek told Lee, holding a hand-sized, oddly angular instrument in midair with the grapple, “we must take with us.”

  “Why?”

  “Look at it,” the physicist said. “If it’s not an astronautical sextant or something close to it, I’ll eat Charnovsky’s rocks for a month.”

  The instrument didn’t look impressive to Lee. It had a lens at one end, a few dials at the other. Most of it was just an angular metal box, with strange printing on it.

  “You want to know where these people originally came from?” Stek asked. “If they came from somewhere other than this planet, the information could be inside this instrument.”

  Lee snapped his gaze from the instrument to Stek’s helmeted face.

  “If it is a sextant, it must have a reference frame built into it. A tape, perhaps, that lists the stars that these people wanted to go to.”

  “Okay,” Lee said. “Take it.”

  By the time they got back up to the main sleeping cave and out to the beach again, it was full daylight.

  “We’ll have to keep them sleeping until almost dawn tomorrow,” Lee told Pascual. “Otherwise they might suspect that something unusual’s happened.”

  The doctor’s face looked concerned but not worried. “We can do that without harming them, I think. But Sid, they’ll be very hungry when they awake.”

  Lee turned to Grote. “How about taking the skimmer out and stunning a couple of big fish and towing them back here to the shallows?”

  Grinning, Grote replied, “Hardly fair sport with the equipment I’ve got.” He turned and headed for the car.

  “Wait,” Stek called to him. “Give me a chance to get this safely packed in a magnetic casing.” And the physicist took the instrument off toward the skimmer.

  “Sid,” Pascual said gently, “I want you to come back with us. You need a thorough medical check.”

  “Medical?” Lee flashed. “Or are you fronting for Lehman?”

  Pascual’s eyes widened with surprise. “If you had a mirror, you would see why I want to check you. You’re breaking out in skin cancers.”

  Instinctively, Lee looked at his hands and forearms. There were a few tiny blisters on them. And more on his belly and legs.

  “It’s from overexposure to the ultraviolet. Hatfield’s skin-darkening didn’t fully protect you.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “I can’t tell without a full examination.”

  Just like a doctor. “I can’t leave now,” Lee said. “I’ve got to be here when they wake up and make sure that they don’t suspect they’ve been visited by the … by us.”

  “And if they do suspect?”

  Lee shrugged. “That’s something we ought to know, even if we can’t do anything about it.”

  “Won’t it be dangerous for you?”

  “Maybe.”

  Pascual shook his head. “You mustn’t stay out in the open any longer. I won’t be responsible for it.”

  “Fine. Do you want me to sign a release form?”

  Grote brought the skimmer back around sundown, with two good-sized fish aboard. The others got aboard around midnight, and with a few final radioed words of parting, they drove off the beach and out to sea.

  At dawn the people woke up. They looked and acted completely normal, as far as Lee could tell. It was one of the children who noticed the still-sluggish fish that Grote had left in a shallow pool just outside the line of breakers. Every man in the clan splashed out, spear in hand, to get them. They feasted happily that day.

  The dream was confusing. Somehow the towers on Titan and the exploding star got mixed together. Lee saw himself driving a bone spear into the sleeping form of one of the natives. The man turned on the ground, with the spear run through his body, and smiled bloodily at him. It was Ardraka.

  “Sid!”

  He snapped awake. It was dark, and the people were sleeping, full-bellied. He was slouched near one of the entryways to the main sleeping cave, at the mouth of a tunnel leading to the openings in the cliff wall.

  “Sid, can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he whispered so low that he could only feel the vibration in his throat.

  “I’m up the beach about three kilometers from the relay unit. You’ve got to come back to the ship. Stek thinks he’s figured out the instrument.”

  Wordlessly, silently, Lee got up and padded through the tunnel and out onto the beach. The night was clear and bright. Dawn would be coming in another hour, he judged. The sea was calm, the wind a gentle crooning as it swept down from the cliffs.

  “Sid, did you hear what I said? Stek thinks he knows what the instrument is for. It’s part of a pointing system for a communications setup.”

  “I’m on my way.” He still whispered and turned to see if anyone was following him.

  Grote was in a biosuit, and no one else was aboard the skimmer. The engineer jabbered about Stek’s work on the instrument all the way back to the ship.

  Just before they arrived, Grote suggested, “Uh, Sid, you do want to put on some coveralls, don’t you?”

  Two biosuited men were setting up some electronics equipment at the base of the ship’s largest telescope, dangling in a hoist sling overhead, the fierce glow of Sirius glinting off its metal barrel.

  “Stek’s setting up an experiment,” Grote explained.

  Lee was bundled into a biosuit and ushered into the physicist’s workroom as soon as he set foot inside the ship. Stek was a large, round, florid man with thinning red hair. Lee had hardly spoken to him at all, except for the few hours at the cave, when the physicist had been encased in a powersuit.

  “It’s a tracker, built to find a star in the sky and lock onto it as long as it’s above the horizon,” Stek said, gesturing to the instrument hovering in a magnetic grapple a few inches above his work table.

  “You’re sure of that?” Lee asked.

  The physicist glanced at him as though he had been insulted. “There’s no doubt about it. It’s a tracker, and it probably was used to aim a communications antenna at their home star.”

  “And where is that?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m setting up the experiment with the telescope.”

  Lee walked over to the work table and stared at the instrument. “How can you be certain that it’s what you say it is?”

  Stek flushed, then controlled himself. With obvious patience, he explained, “X-ray probes showed that the instrument contained a magnetic memory tape. The tape was in binary code, and it was fairly simple to transliterate the code, electronically, into the ship’s main computers. We didn’t even have to touch the instrument physically … except with photons.”

  Lee made an expression that showed he was duly impressed.

  Looking happier, Stek went on, “The computer cross-checked the instrument’s coding and came up with correlations: altitude references were on the instrument’s tape, and astronomical ephemerides, timing data, and so forth. Exactly what we’d put into a communications tracker.”

  “But this was made by a different race of people—”

  “
It makes no difference,” Stek said sharply. “The physics are the same. The universe is the same. The instrument can only do the job it was designed to do, and that job was to track a single star.”

  “Only one star?”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m certain it was for communicating with their home star.”

  “So we can find their home star after all.” Lee felt the old dread returning, but with it something new, something deeper. Those people in the caves were our enemy. And maybe their brothers, the ones who built the machines on Titan, are still out there somewhere looking for them—and for us.

  XI

  Lee ate back at the Sirius globe, but Pascual insisted on his remaining in a biosuit until they had thoroughly checked him out. And they wouldn’t let him eat Earth food, although there was as much local food as he wanted. He didn’t want much.

  “You’ve thinned out too much,” Marlene said. She was sitting next to him at the galley table.

  “Ever see a fat Sirian?” He meant it as a joke; it came out waspish. Marlene dropped the subject.

  The whole ship’s company gathered around the telescope and the viewscreen that would show an amplified picture of the telescope’s field of view. Stek bustled around, making last-minute checks and adjustments of the equipment. Rassmussen stood taller than everyone else, looking alternately worried and excited. Everyone, including Lee, was in a biosuit.

  Lehman showed up at Lee’s elbow. “Do you think it will work?”

  “Driving the telescope from the ship’s computer’s version of the instrument’s tape? Stek seems to think it’ll go all right.”

  “And you?”

  Lee shrugged. “The people in the caves told me what I wanted to know. Now this instrument will tell us where they came from originally.”

  “The home world of our ancient enemies?”

  “Yes.”

  For once, Lehman didn’t seem to be amused. “And what happens then?”

  “I don’t know,” Lee said. “Maybe we go out and see if they are still there. Maybe we reopen the war.”

  “If there was a war.”

  “There was. It might still be going on, for all we know. Maybe we’re just a small part of it, a skirmish.”

  “A skirmish that wiped out the life on this planet,” Lehman said.

  “And almost wiped out Earth, too.”

  “But what about the people on this planet, Sid? What about the people in the caves?”

  Lee couldn’t answer.

  “Do we let them die out, just because they might have been our enemies a few millennia ago?”

  “They would still be our enemies if they knew who we are,” Lee said tightly.

  “So we let them die?”

  Lee tried to blot their faces out of his mind, to erase the memory of Ardraka and the children, and Ardra apologizing shamefully and the people fishing in the morning …

  “No,” he heard himself say. “We’ve got to help them. They can’t hurt us anymore, and we ought to help them.”

  Now Lehman smiled.

  “It’s ready,” Stek said, his voice pitched high with excitement.

  Sitting at the desk-sized console that stood beside the telescope, he thumbed the power switch and punched a series of buttons.

  The viewscreen atop the desk glowed into life, and a swarm of stars appeared. With a low hum of power, the telescope turned slowly to the left. The scene in the viewscreen shifted. Beside the screen was a smaller display, an astronomical map with a bright luminous dot showing where the telescope was aiming.

  The telescope stopped turning, hesitated, edged slightly more to the left, and then made a final, barely discernible correction upward.

  “It’s locked on.”

  The viewscreen showed a meager field of stars, with a single bright pinpoint centered exactly in the middle of the screen.

  “What is it, what star?”

  Lee pushed forward, through the crowd that clustered around the console.

  “My God,” Stek said, his voice sounding hollow. “That’s … the sun.”

  Lee felt his knees wobble. “They’re from Earth!”

  “It can’t be,” someone said.

  Lee shoved past the people in front of him and stared at the map. The bright dot was fixed on the sun’s location.

  “They’re from Earth!” he shouted. “They’re part of us!”

  “But how could …”

  “They were a colony of ours,” Lee realized. “The Others were an enemy … an enemy that nearly wiped them out and smashed Earth’s civilization back into a stone age. The Others built those damned machines on Titan, but Ardraka’s people did not. And we didn’t destroy the people here … we’re the same people!”

  “But that’s—”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “He is right,” Charnovsky said, his heavy bass rumbling above the other voices. They all stopped to hear him. “There are too many coincidences any other way. These people are completely human because they came from Earth. Any other explanation is extraneous.”

  Lee grabbed the Russian by the shoulders. “Nick, we’ve got work to do! We’ve got to help them. We’ve got to introduce them to fire and metals and cereal grains—”

  Charnovsky laughed. “Yes, yes, of course. But not tonight, eh? Tonight we celebrate.”

  “No,” Lee said, realizing where he belonged. “Tonight I go back to them.”

  “Go back?” Marlene asked.

  “Tonight I go back with a gift,” Lee went on. “A gift from my people to Ardraka’s. A plastic boat from the skimmer. That’s a gift they’ll be able to understand and use.”

  Lehman said, “You still don’t know who built the machinery on Titan.”

  “We’ll find out one of these days.”

  Rassmussen broke in, “You realize that we will have to return Earthward before the next expedition could possibly get anywhere near here.”

  “Some of us can wait here for the next expedition. I will, anyway.”

  The captain nodded and a slow grin spread across his face. “I knew you would even before we found out that your friends are really our brothers.”

  Lee looked around for Grote. “Come on, Jerry. Let’s get moving. I want to see Ardraka’s face when he sees the boat.”

  Symbolism in Science Fiction

  This is one of the pieces I write occasionally for The Writer magazine. It is also an example of the frustrations of working for magazine editors.

  When I edited Analog and, later, Omni, I made it my policy to buy only what I wanted to print—and then to print what I had bought. I did not believe it to be the editor’s job, or right, to mangle the author’s prose. If I wanted changes made in a manuscript, I asked the author to make them. It’s up to the author to decide if he or she wants to rewrite to suit editorial whim, or take the manuscript to another market.

  Maybe it was just laziness on my part. I didn’t want to rewrite pieces before publishing them. Maybe it was because I am fundamentally a writer, and I resent having editors muck up my prose—especially after they have bought the piece and I no longer have any control over what they are doing to it.

  The editorial changes made in “Symbolism in Science Fiction” were not serious. It is unfair, really, for me to complain about them here. But since this was originally written for writers, especially new writers, perhaps this is the best place to post the warning: Beware of editors editing!

  Having posted that notice, I now invite you to read what I had to say about the uses of symbolism in science fiction.

  Nobody writes about the future.

  Even in the farthest-out science fiction stories, set millions of years from now on weird exotic alien planets, the science fiction writer is really writing about the world and people of today. The far-future settings, the alien creatures and strange worlds are all symbols that replace everyday realities with fantastic inventions.

  One of the great strengths of science fiction is to combine symbolism with extrapola
tive power, thereby producing the ability to examine the world of today by creating a set of symbols that sketch out a future world which is a reflection of here-and-now. Such stories usually are based on a simple question: “If this goes on … how will it change the world and the people in it?” The writer takes a trend from today’s world—transplant surgery, for example —and exaggerates the situation, stretches it as far as the imagination can reach, then builds a story around that extrapolated society. In this manner, science fiction can produce powerful social commentary. Jonathan Swift, George Orwell, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and many other writers have held up mirrors to their own societies by writing incisive stories based on that question, “If this goes on … then what?”

  In such stories the setting, the background, the gadgetry, even the characters themselves, become symbols that stand for the things and people of today’s world. For example, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a savage satire of the English society in which he lived. Knowing that a direct attack on his “betters” would get him thrown in prison, or worse, Swift created a series of fantasy worlds in which he could lampoon the people and social customs he saw all around him—while keeping his neck from the chopping block.

  Many Russian science fiction writers use that tactic today. It is not healthy to criticize the government in Moscow, or the “progressive” society of the Soviet Union. But a story set on the planet Mars, a hundred years in the future, can satirize government red tape and bungling with virtual impunity. Mars (the Red Planet, you know) becomes à thinly veiled symbol for the USSR. Even though the Soviet authorities see through the disguise, they usually leave the writer in peace.

  “The government keeps one eye closed,” a Russian writer told me. Even in a society as tightly controlled as the Soviets’, there have to be some ways to let off steam, to ease the pressures of oppression; in its way, science fiction serves that purpose in Russia.

  It has served similar purposes here. In the McCarthy era, where almost any criticism of American society was pounced upon as evidence of communist subversion, science fiction writers were among the few who fought back. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was a powerful warning that witch-hunting and book-burning destroy not only freedom and democracy, but the human spirit as well.