Astounding Science Fiction Stories: An Anthology of 350 Scifi Stories Volume 2 (Halcyon Classics)

by Various

  Lennie says The Explorer Class were all armed--

  Fine, says Cray, presumably the weapons will be thoroughly obsolete and recognizable only to a Historian--

  Lennie says the construction of no weapon developed by the Space Department has ever been released; making it plain that anyone but a Nitwit knows that already.

  Eru and Kirsty have been busy for some time writing notes to each other and she now gives a small sharp cough and having collected our attention utters the following Address.

  "There is a point we seem to have missed. If I may recapitulate, the idea is to take this ship Gilgamesh to Incognita and make it appear as though she had crashed there while attempting to land. I understand that the ship has been buried in the polar cap; though she must have been melted out if the people on Crusoe examined the engines. Of course the cold--All the same there may have been ... well ... changes. Or when ... when we thaw the ship out again--"

  I find I am swallowing good and hard, and several of the others look sick, especially Lennie. Lennie has his eyes fixed on the colonel; it is not prescience, but a slight sideways movement of the colonel's eye causes him to blurt out, "What is he doing here?"

  Meaning Mr. Yardo who seems to have been asleep for some time, with his eyes open and grinning like the spikes on a dog collar. The colonel gives him another sideways look and says, "Mr. Yardo is an expert on the rehabilitation of space-packed materials."

  This is stuff transported in un-powered hulls towed by grappling-beams; the hulls are open to space hence no need for refrigeration, and the contents are transferred to specially equipped orbital stations before being taken down to the planet. But--

  Mr. Yardo comes to life at the sound of his name and his grin widens alarmingly.

  "Especially meat," he says.

  * * * * *

  It is maybe two hours afterwards, Eru having adjourned the meeting abruptly so that we can ... er ... take in the implications of the new data. Lennie has gone off somewhere by himself; Kirsty has gone after him with a view to Mothering him; Eru, I suspect, is looking for Kirsty; Pavel and Aro and Dillie and the Crow are in a cabin arguing in whispers; Nick and P. Zapotec are exploring one of the Hoppers, cargo-carrying, drop-shaped, and I only hope they don't hop through the hull in it.

  B and I having done a tour of the ship and ascertained all this have withdrawn to the Conference Room because we are tired of our cabins and this seems to be the only other place to sit.

  B breaks a long silence with the remark that However often you see it M'Clare's technique is something to watch, like choosing my statement to open with, it broke the ice beautifully.

  I say, "Shall I tell you something?"

  B says Yes if it's interesting.

  "My statement," I inform her, "ran something like this: The best hope of inducing a suspension of the aggressive attitude of both parties, long enough to offer hope of ultimate reconciliation, lies in the intrusion of a new factor in the shape of an outside force seen to be impartially hostile to both."

  B says: "Gosh. Come to think of it Liz you have not written like that in years, you have gone all pompous like everyone else; well that makes it even more clever of M'Clare."

  Enter Cray Patterson and drapes himself sideways on a chair, announcing that his own thoughts begin to weary him.

  I say this does not surprise me, at all.

  "Lizzie my love," says he, "you are twice blessed being not only witty yourself but a cause of wit in others; was that bit of Primitive Lee with which M'Clare regaled us really not from the hand of the mistress, or was it a mere pastiche?"

  I say Whoever wrote that it was not me anyway.

  "It seemed to me pale and luke-warm compared with the real thing," says Cray languidly, "which brings me to a point that, to quote dear Kirsty, seems to have been missed."

  I say, "Yep. Like what language it was that these people wrote their log in that we can be certain the Incognitans won't know."

  "More than that," says B, "we didn't decide who they are or where they were coming from or how they came to crash or anything."

  "Come to think of it, though," I point out, "the language and a good many other things must have been decided already because of getting the right hypnotapes and translators on board."

  B suddenly lights up.

  "Yes, but look, I bet that's what we're here for, I mean that's why they picked us instead of Space Department people--the ship's got to have a past history, it has to come from a planet somewhere only no one must ever find out where it's supposed to be. Someone will have to fake a log, only I don't see how--"

  "The first reel with data showing the planet of origin got damaged during the crash," says Cray impatiently.

  "Yes, of course--but we have to find a reason why they were in that part of Space and it has to be a nice one, I mean so that the Incognitans when they finally read the log won't hate them any more--"

  "Maybe they were bravely defending their own planet by hunting down an interplanetary raider," I suggest.

  Cray says it will take only the briefest contact with other planets to convince the Incognitans that interplanetary raiders can't and don't exist, modern planetary alarm and defense systems put them out of the question.

  "That's all he knows," says B, "some interplanetary pirates raided Lizzie's father's farm once. Didn't they, Liz?"

  "Yes in a manner of speaking, but they were bums who pinched a spaceship from a planet not many parsecs away, a sparsely inhabited mining world like my own which had no real call for an alarm system, so that hardly alters the argument."

  "Well," says B, "the alarm system on Incognita can't be so hot or the observation ships could not have got in, or out, for that matter, unless of course they have some other gadget we don't know about."

  "On the other hand," she considers, "to mention Interplanetary raiders raises the idea of Menace in an Unfriendly Universe again, and this is what we want to cancel out.

  "These people," she says at last with a visionary look in her eye, "come from a planet which went isolationist and abandoned space travel; now they have built up their civilization to a point where they can build ships of their own again, and the ones on Gilgamesh have cut loose from the ideas of their ancestors that led to their going so far afield--"

  "How far afield?" says Cray.

  "No one will ever know," I point out to him. "Don't interrupt."

  "Anyway," says B, "they set out to rejoin the rest of the Human Race just like the people on Gilgamesh really did, in fact, a lot of this is the truth only kind of backwards--they were looking for the Cradle of the Race, that's what. Then there was some sort of disaster that threw them off course to land on an uninhabited section of a planet that couldn't understand their signals. And when Incognita finally does take to space flight again I bet the first thing the people do is to try and follow back to where Gilgamesh came from and make contact with them. It'll become a legend on Incognita--the Lost People ... the Lost ... Lost--"

  "The Lost Kafoozalum," says Cray. "In other words we switch these people off a war only to send them on a wild goose chase."

  At which a strange voice chimes in, "No, no, no, son, you've got it all wrong."

  * * * * *

  Mr. Yardo is with us like a well-meaning skeleton.

  During the next twenty-five minutes we learn a lot about Mr. Yardo including material for a good guess at how he came to be picked for this expedition; doubtless there are many experts on Reversal Of Vacuum-Induced Changes in Organic Tissues but maybe only one of them a Romantic at heart.

  Mr. Yardo thinks chasing the Wild Goose will do the Incognitans all the good in the galaxy, it will take their minds off controversies over interhemispherical trade and put them on to the quest of the Unobtainable; they will get to know something of the Universe outside their own little speck. Mr. Yardo has seen a good deal of the Universe in the course of advising on how to recondition space-packed meat and he found it an Uplifting Experience.

  We gather he f
inds this desperate bit of damfoolery we are on now pretty Uplifting altogether.

  Cray keeps surprisingly quiet but it is as well that the rest of the party start to trickle in about twenty minutes later the first arrivals remarking Oh that's where you've got to!

  Presently we are all congregated at one end of the table as before, except that Mr. Yardo is now sitting between B and me; when M'Clare and the colonel come in he firmly stays where he is evidently considering himself One of Us now.

  "The proposition," says M'Clare, "is that we intend to take Gilgamesh to Incognita and land her there in such a way as to suggest that she crashed. In the absence of evidence to the contrary the Incognitans are bound to assume that that was her intended destination, and the presence of weapons, even disarmed, will suggest that her mission was aggressive. Firstly, can anyone suggest a better course of action? or does anyone object to this one?"

  We all look at Lennie who sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters "No."

  Kirsty gives her little cough and says there is a point which has not been mentioned.

  If a heavily-armed ship crashes on Incognita, will not the government of the hemisphere in which it crashes be presented with new ideas for offensive weapons? And won't this make it more likely that they will start aggression? And won't the fear of this make the other hemisphere even more likely to try and get in first before the new weapons are complete?

  Hell, I ought to have thought of that.

  From the glance of unwilling respect which the colonel bestows on M'Clare it is plain these points have been dealt with.

  "The weapons on Gilgamesh were disarmed when she was rediscovered," he says. "Essential sections were removed. The Incognitans won't be able to reconstruct how they worked."

  Another fact for which we shall have to provide an explanation. Well how about this: The early explorers sent out by these people--the people in Gilgamesh ... oh, use Cray's word and call them Lost Kafoozalum anyway their ships were armed, but they never found any enemies and the Idealists of B's story refused even to carry arms any more.

  (Which is just about what happened when the Terries set out to rediscover the colonies, after all.)

  So the Lost Kafoozalum could not get rid of their weapons completely because it would have meant rebuilding the ship; so they just partially dismantled them.

  Mr. Yardo suddenly chips in, "About that other point, girlie, surely there must be some neutral ground left on a half-occupied planet like that?" He beams round, pleased at being able to contribute.

  B says, "The thing is," and stops.

  We wait.

  We have about given up hope when she resumes, "The thing is, it will have to be neutral ground of course, only that might easily become a thingummy ... I mean a, a casus belli in itself. So the other thing is it ought to be a place which is very hard to get at, so difficult that neither side can really get to it first, they'll have to reach an agreement and co-operate."

  "Yeah," says Dillie "that sounds fine, but what sort of place is that?"

  I am sorting out in my head the relative merits of mountains, deserts, gorges, et cetera, when I an seized with inspiration at the same time as half the group; we say the same thing in different words and for a time there is Babel, then the idea emerges:

  "Drop her into the sea!"

  The colonel nods resignedly.

  "Yes," he says, "that's what we're going to do."

  He presses a button and our projection-screens light up, first with a map of one pole of Incognita, expanding in scale till finally we are looking down on one little bit of coast on one of the polar islands. A glacier descends on to it from mountains inland and there is a bay between cliffs. Then we get a stereo scene of approximately the least hospitable of scenery I ever did see--except maybe when Parvati Lal Dutt's brother made me climb up what he swore was the smallest peak in the Himalayas.

  It is a small bay backed by tumbled cliffs. A shelving beach can be deduced from contour and occasional boulders big enough to stick through the snow that smothers it all. A sort of mess of rocks and mud at the back may be glacial moraine. Over the sea the ice is split in all directions by jagged rifts and channels; the whole thing is a bit like Antarctica but nothing is high enough or white enough to uplift the spirit, it looks not only chilly but kind of mean.

  "This place," says the colonel, "is the only one, about which we have any topographical information, that seems to meet the requirements. Got to know about it through an elementary planetography. One of the observers had the sense to see we might need something of the sort. This place"--the stereo jigs as he taps his projector--"seems it's the center of a rising movement in the crust ... that's not to the point. Neither side has bothered to claim the land at the poles...."

  I see their point if it's all like this--

  "... And a ship trying to land on those cliffs might very well pitch over into the sea. That is, if she were trying to land on emergency rockets."

  Rockets--that brings home the ancientness of this ship Gilgamesh--but after all the ships that settled Incognita probably carried emergency rockets, too.

  This settled, the meeting turns into a briefing session and merges imperceptibly with the beginning of the job.

  * * * * *

  The job of course is Faking the background of the crash; working out the past history and present aims of the Lost Kafoozalum. We have to invent a planet and what's more difficult convey all the essential information about it by the sort of sideways hints you gather among peoples' personal possessions; diaries, letters et cetera; and what is even more difficult we have to leave out anything that could lead to definite identification of our unknown world with any known one.

  We never gave that world a name; it might be dangerous. Who speaks of their world by name, except to strangers? They call it "home"--or "Earth," as often as not.

  Some things have been decided for us. Language, for instance--one of two thousand or so Earth tongues that went out of use late enough to be plausible as the main language of a colonized planet. The settlers on Incognita were not of the sort to take along dictionaries of the lesser-known tongues, so the computers at Russett had a fairly wide choice.

  We had to take a hypnocourse in that language. Ditto the script, one of several forgotten phonetic shorthands. (Designed to enable the tongues of Aliens to be written down; but the Aliens have never been met. It is plausible enough that some colony might have kept the script alive; after all Thasia uses something of the sort to this day.)

  The final result of our work looks pretty small. Twenty-three "Personal Background Sets"--a few letters, a diary in some, an assortment of artifacts. Whoever stocked this ship we are on supplied wood, of the half-dozen kinds that have been taken wherever men have gone; stocks of a few plastics--known at the time of the Exodus, or easily developed from those known, and not associated with any particular planet. Also books on Design, a Form-writer for translating drawings into materials, and so on. Someone put in a lot of work before this voyage began.

  Most of the time it is like being back on Russet doing a group Project. What we are working on has no more and no less reality than that. Our work is all read into a computer and checked against everybody else's. At first we keep clashing. Gradually a consistent picture builds up and gets translated finally into the Personal Background Kits. The Lost Kafoozalum start to exist like people in a History book.

  Fifteen days hard work and we have just about finished; then we reach--call it Planet Gilgamesh.

  I wake in my bunk to hear that there will be brief cessation of weight; strap down, please.

  We are coming off Mass-Time to go on planetary drive.

  Colonel Delano-Smith is in charge of operations on the planet, with Ram and Peter to assist. None of the rest of us see the melting out of fifty years' accumulation of ice, the pumping away of the water, the fitting and testing of the holds for the grappling-beams. We stay inside the ship, on five-eighths gee which we do not have time to get used to, and try t
o work, and discard the results before the computer can do so. There is hardly any work left to do, anyway.

  It takes nearly twelve hours to get the ship free, and caulked, and ready to lift. (Her hull has to be patched because of Mr. Yardo's operations which make use of several sorts of vapors). Then there is a queer blind period with Up now one way, now another, and sudden jerks and tugs that upset everything not in gimbals or tied down; interspersed with periods when weightlessness supervenes with no warning at all. After an hour or two of this it would be hard to say whether Mental or physical discomfort is more acute; B consulted, however, says my autonomic system must be quite something, after five minutes her thoughts were with her viscera entirely.

  Then, suddenly, we are back on Mass-Time again.

  Two days to go.

  * * * * *

  At first being on Mass-Time makes everything seem normal again. By sleep time there is a strain, and next day it is everywhere. I know as well as any that on Mass-Time the greater the mass the faster the shift; all the same I cannot help feeling we are being slowed, dragged back by the dead ship coupled to our live one.

  When you stand by the hull Gilgamesh is only ten feet away.

  I should have kept something to work on like B and Kirsty who have not done their Letters for Home in Case of Accidents; mine is signed and sealed long ago. I am making a good start on a Neurosis when Delano-Smith announces a Meeting for one hour ahead.

  Hurrah! now there is a time-mark fixed I think of all sorts of things I should have done before; for instance taking a look at the controls of the Hoppers.

  I have been in one of them half an hour and figured out most of the dials--Up down and sideways are controlled much as in a helicar, but here a big viewscreen has been hooked in to the autopilot--when across the hold I see the air lock start to move.

  Gilgamesh is on the other side.

  It takes forever to open. When at last it swings wide on the dark tunnel what comes through is a storage rack, empty, floating on antigrav.