by Rex Gordon
After delivering his admonition to Sorensen, Duncan looked around like a responsible person to see what he ought to do next. He saw the little blonde, Penny, alone and out of place in the desert, and looking a little forlorn. He went and put his arm around her. "You and I have got a lot in common,” Len heard him say to her as they went away together.
Duncan stood six foot three, and when he put his arm around Penny’s waist, his hand came distinctly higher than it should have, but with Duncan in contact with her Penny did not seem to mind. Her back view quivered interestingly with her high-heeled walk as Duncan took her to look at the crew; a dark young man, Salford, was watching them with a spray-gun.
A desert is as good a place as any to make acquaintance with the people you’ve got mixed up with, Len thought.
“They’ll have seen us disappear from their radar screens,” he said to Sorensen. “I doubt that they’ll leave us here long enough to starve.”
The fair-haired engineer was evidently a man who kept his equanimity. “They’ll send an expedition, you think?”
“Sometime.”
“We don’t want them to hurry. Don’t you think it’s time we made a protest? They were pushing us around a little.”
Len agreed that it had been time they made a protest ‘The thing about a protest,” he remarked, “is that it ought to be effective.”
“At least this is something they’ll notice,” Sorensen said.
The tall, red-haired girl came up to Sorensen, who said, “Hello, Vera.” Although Sorensen could only have known Vera for a few hours, they seemed to know one another quite well, and Len moved away to look at the rest of the party.
There had been only one man injured in the crash, and he was the soldier who had been in the fore-part of the plane threatening them with a gun. When the plane had landed and tilted on its nose the dark one, Salford, had launched himself down the gangway at him, and the soldier had been unlucky. He was now being tended by a girl, Eliza Teen, who had admitted to nurses’ training, and a young man, Ed Creet, who had stated he was a doctor.
Seeing the soldier laid out on a level rock, and Eliza and Ed standing nearby and discussing him as medical people did, as though the next procedure might well be an amputation, Len remarked to himself again that their party did seem to have a variety among its talents.
He looked around hopefully for a girl who was unattached, and saw the slim girl sitting on a rocky outcrop and combing her hair as though that were the normal place she performed her morning toilet. It was not difficult to get into conversation. He went to her and said, “Do you know what all this is about, by any chance?”
She said her name was Lucinda, and stopped combing her long black hair, which she allowed to fall around her shoulders. She was very slim, he noticed, and wearing an interestingly tom dress which she contrived to make look as though it were intended and had been made that way. She looked at Len calmly and said, “Do you intend to do anything about it when they come to get us?”
Len found himself thinking what a poised and pleasant girl she was.
“It depends on how they do it, I think,” he remarked, looking around the desert horizon and the sky.
Lucinda too looked at the northern horizon. “Possibly with atomic cannon?”
“Be reasonable,” Len suggested. “We’re not as bad as that.”
Lucinda was thoughtful as well as poised. “They may be facing the container difficulty. You know the theory? In the days when people used to search for a universal solvent, they found themselves much taxed by the obvious difficulty of finding an insoluble container in which to keep it”
Len considered her scientific imagery. Since the dress had been quite badly tom on landing, it was not the only thing he was comfortably able to consider. He found things began to appeal to him. “I notice we have a variety of professions. Are you a chemist by any chance?”
“No,” she said, and indicated people around the party. “Ropotsky is our biochemist, and Imantha is on the inorganic side. My own work is social psychology.” Their party appeared to interest her. “With a specialty in small social groups.”
Len was sure she was a most useful person to have, and someone that they needed.
They looked at the people and the desert together. They remarked to one another that if no one came to fetch them, they were going to have a long time to look at both.
Len remembered the sight he had seen before landing. It was something to talk about. “Were you by any chance looking toward the mountains before we landed? I only had a quick view, but I believe I saw something there, like a tilted dish. It looked like a picture I once saw of a radio telescope, from the days when there was space research.”
Lucinda said, “What would that be doing in this part of Arcon, even if it weren’t illegal? Are you sure it was not a hallucination?”
“Is there any psychological reason why a hallucination should take the form of a radio telescope like a tilted dish?” Len said.
Lucinda looked at him speculatively. “I think I’ll wait until I’m more wholly clothed before I answer that,” she said. “It would be more profitable to consider any possible connection between our party and uninhabited mountains with a radio telescope.”
Len had to admit that it was a problem which for the moment, was quite beyond him. He began to find their association with the rest of the party boring. Susan and Ropotsky had wandered away, he noticed, ostensibly to climb a knoll to see if they could see anything across the desert, though having climbed it they had disappeared on the other side. He wondered if Lucinda would accept a suggestion that they do something of the same kind, for he had a strong feeling that things were developing fast between them, and he wished to take them further. Lucinda withstood his gaze rather well. He was not pleased when they were interrupted by the dark young man, Salford.
Salford had handed over his spray-gun to the girl Iman-tha, who was dutifully and seriously carrying out Salford’s instructions about looking after their former captors. Salford himself seemed to be canvassing the party. They had already seen him approach Duncan and Sorensen, who were again examining the plane hopefully but with no visible degree of faith in it.
“Why shouldn’t we load up with all the provisions we have available and set off across the desert?” Salford said.
Len and Lucinda looked at the young man who appeared to have such a stock of optimism as to be unquenchable.
“Are you feeling all right, Salford?” Len said.
“What do you mean, all right?”
Len looked away over the immensity of the Arcon desert. “I thought you might have hit your head on something when you made that dive down the plane to get that soldier.”
Salford’s dark face contracted. It was not so much what Len said as a general frustration he appeared to feel about their situation. “Why, you—! What are you going to do, just sit here and wait to be recaptured?”
Lucinda apparently knew his first name. “I didn’t bring my walking shoes, Desmond,” she said soothingly. “It would probably be easier for you to deal with things when someone brings some transport”
Salford looked at them angrily, then went away to find someone else. They saw him talking urgently to Ed Creet and Eliza Teen. Len could think of no one less likely to set off across the Arcon desert with no more than they could carry than a medical team.
“We may have trouble with that character, if we stay together,” he suggested to Lucinda.
Lucinda was amicably thoughtful. “Perhaps someone else has had some trouble with him,” she suggested. “Perhaps that’s why he’s here.”
Len was again going to suggest that they move a little away from the rest of the party. He had noticed that Lucinda had been careful about her tom dress when Salford was present, and she was less careful with him. He felt he had reason to believe that she did not find him wholly unacceptable. He felt he knew the signs. But Susan and Ropotsky came running back over their knoll again.
“They look
as though they have either seen something or met someone,” Lucinda said.
Ropotsky and Susan were calling, waving their arms, and pointing to the north. While everyone in the party turned to look at them, something appeared, tiny and distant at first, in the sky above the knoll. It proved to be a slowly approaching flight of helicopters.
“We are about to be recaptured,” Lucinda said. “You don’t happen to have a safety pin, do you?”
Len offered his tie, which would at least tie things together, and Lucinda accepted it gratefully. Len helped her fix it, to which Lucinda did not object as long as the helicopters were still a long way away.
Len felt more resentful about the idea of being recaptured, and possibly ordered about, than he had. When Duncan and Sorensen walked over to talk to him, he asked them, “Can’t we put up a resistance of some kind? Make a fight of it?”
Sorensen and Duncan had apparently had the same idea, but Duncan was looking thoughtfully at the helicopters now that they were getting nearer. “Two-rotor jobs,” he remarked professionally. “Armored troop carriers.”
They watched the helicopters perform a maneuver. They had split up into two groups, apparently with the intention of approaching them from either side. Instead of approaching them directly, they were arranging themselves in a circle around them, and going down to land.
“What are they doing?” Sorensen inquired.
“Landing,” Duncan said. “To turn the armored troops on us.”
“Don’t they seem to be attaching a lot of importance on our party?” Len said.
“I told you,” Lucinda remarked. “Atomic cannon.”
“They can’t think that will be necessary,” Duncan said.
It was not, and they watched developments. Imantha and Salford came over with the light arms they had captured from the soldiers from the plane, but even Salford seemed tom between the realities of the situation and his desire to make a fight of it.
After the landing maneuver, one helicopter flew nearer, but stayed at. a wary distance while it addressed them through a loudspeaker. The voice boomed across the desert.
“Indicate your surrender and lay down your arms, or we will commence a gas attack.”
Salford looked at the wind conditions, which were ideal for the use of an incapacitating nerve gas. Len told Lucinda, “Your military assessment of the situation was an overestimate.” Duncan looked regretful and said, “We had better surrender gracefully.”
Ed Creet did not wait for their advice. Perhaps the condition of his patient had something to do with it, but he took off his white shirt and began to wave it.
The helicopter circled around them and ordered, “Split up into twos and separate. You will be picked up by transports.”
Ropotsky had looked thoroughly disgusted throughout the entire proceedings. He was holding Susan’s hand. “Like de-fusing an atomic bomb,” he said. “They believe they only get the critical mass when they put the parts together.” Then he set off back into the desert again with Susan as the armored cars approached them.
Len wondered if there was not, after all, some significance in Ropotsky’s obscure remark as he and Lucinda left the rest and were approached and picked up by one of the vehicles that were coming in from all directions.
It was true it seemed quieter when he and Lucinda were isolated and traveling between armed soldiers in the back of the open vehicle, but he noticed that instead of returning to the helicopters, the vehicles had formed into a line, and were heading north across the desert It was possible that the authorities were not trusting them in aircraft again, but he deduced from die fact that they were heading for their destination on the ground that it must be at no very great distance.
XXI
The Shopping Lists of Mary Jean Smith'.
(On the torn-off corner of an unmailed letter.)
. . . Oh, Linda, dear, do forgive me for pouring out mu heart to you. What will I do if John dies? How helpless I feel in this cruel world.
Love,
Mary.
Pulmony’s Arcon-Check Elixir.
Two steaks, one good, one cheap.
Earth-type pure-grown fruit? PRICES!
Sell the brooch.
Inquire cost clean-air unit.
See nursing-help people.
XXII
Correspondence File
From:
George Barault,
Consulting Engineer,
Davis City,
June 15, 503 A. L.
To:
Commandant C. Q. Lankowitz,
Information Office Headquarters,
By Messenger.
Dear Commandant,
Most certainly I value our connection, and I hope that the Information Office will continue to use my consultant service from time to time. I cannot say how highly I attach importance to our mutual trust, especially on a personal basis, of absolute discretion.
It was just that I hesitated to commit myself to writing on such a matter. As it is, now that I have made the investigation you asked of me, and assuming that you and the army are committed to this project, I doubt if you will really want to show these results to anyone, as you said you might.
The truth is that Arcon’s capacity for flights to other stars is as it always has been. You know as well as I do that the knowledge was brought from Earth, and, in your own files and archives, you must have the plans of how to construct starships of all shapes and sizes. As to industrial capacity, a hundred years ago, if the entire planet had bent its whole effort to the will, we could have done it.
But have you counted the cost? Liquid oxygen for the lift-off stages alone would be a drain on our industrial supply, but the vital production of high-tensile alloys would stop the entire aircraft industry for at least a year. This kind of thing just could not he done in secret. You would have to involve the planet in a nation-wide effort, and confide in all the people.
What do you propose to do? You can’t seriously send off one man, and anything else would be a sham, and I am at a loss because I don’t know your political motives.
Forgive my apprehension,
George Barault.
XXIII
The Shopping Lists of Mary Jean Smith:
One steak
I can see him every time I close my eyes.
One bread One
One..,
If I went to the park, I could sit and look at the children’s fountain.
One
The children too will die that way. Looking at them, and watching them play in the city park, I would count their seconds by my pulse-beat.
I am thirty-five. No shopping this day.
XXIV
From I. O. records:
The Conference of the 22nd November....
Commandant C. Q. Lankowitz left the capital on official leave and traveled, as was natural for a person in his position, to the exclusive resorts of southeast Arcon. He did not stay in one of the better-known towns on the pink-tinged beaches on the fabled southeastern sea, but in the area where the shore was broken by the bold pink and golden headlands, and it was there, where the cafe terraces hung high above the water, and the climbing and hanging plants partly obscured the view of the eternal sea and sky and the coves below, that he held his special conference with delegates T. Chinn of the Southern, and P. Vulmany of the Eastern regions.
For reasons of security, the conferences were held for the most part at a table on a terrace in the open air, so that the only record of the conversations consists of a recording made by T. Chinn by concealing a microphone in one of the flowering plants that decorated the balustrade by the table above the sheer drop below.
During the first day, T. Chinn and P. Vulmany inquired about the latest news from the capital, particularly regarding security and the penetration of the army into the Information Office, and hence possibly into the Yellow Party itself. Commandant Lankowitz assured them that this leak had now been firmly closed, thanks largely to the work and enthusiasm of G
. Berkeley of the Capital Division, who had proved to be an extremely useful man, though about whom there were certain reservations which he would mention later.
T. Chinn inquired about relations with the army, and was told that they appeared to be satisfied with the increased estimates. P. Vulmany asked why, therefore, C. Q. Lankowitz had called them to what was virtually an emergency meeting of the inner Council.
C. Q. Lankowitz said it was because the space project to which they were committed had proved in technical and political terms impractical. As he believed they already knew or suspected, the construction of an actual stellar vehicle, capable of making a journey to a star, would require such a diversion of industrial and technical resources from Arcon industry that the whole matter would have to come to public notice.
T. Chinn remarked that this was a very serious statement, and that, as the waiter was hanging about within fifteen feet of their table, they had better order fresh drinks and get rid of him. After this was done, P. Vulmany said that to abandon the project would not only reopen the whole question of their relations with the army, but it would also have a catastrophic effect on party morale. C. Q. Lankowitz said he agreed, and that was why he had called them together as a small, experienced and inner group to discuss the matter.
Vulmany queried whether, dangerous as they knew the course was, they might not go the whole hog and make the project public, representing it as a patriotic response to an incalculable threat to Arcon. T. Chinn said that that would be difficult in view of the long-term Green and Blue propaganda against space adventures. They had long ago decided to work through the popular political parties, rather than against them. C. Q. Lankowitz said that they should remember that the whole basis of the project was the Information Office story of signals received from Vista, and that if the matter was made public every news organ and technical institute would be trying to hear the signals. In these circumstances, it would be impossible to maintain the fiction.
