Collision Course

TEN

Laurance’s defiant words remained with Bernard as he boarded the ship and made his way to the passenger cabin to await blastoff. It was not often that you heard anyone openly expressing antagonism to the Archonate, especially when the outburst came from someone like Laurance. Bernard realized with surprise that the little interchange had jangled his nerves more than it had any right to do. We’re conditioned to love and respect the Archonate, he thought. And we don’t realize how deep that conditioning lies until someone rubs against it.

It was strange to think of criticizing the Archonate or a specific Archon. To do so was virtually to demonstrate an atavistic urge to return to the dreadful confusion of pre-Archonate days. And such a return, of course, was inconceivable.

The Archons had ruled Earth since the dim days of the early space age. The First Archonate had risen out of the nightmare anarchy of the twenty-second century; despairing of mankind, thirteen strong men and true had seized the reins of command and set things aright. Before the Archonate, mankind had been splintered into nations forever at each other’s throats, and the stars waited in vain. But Merriman’s invention of the transmat had made possible the rise of the Archonate, with Merriman himself as the First Technarch, five centuries gone. And man had yielded to oligarchic rule, and the Archons had goaded man to the stars.

And, training and choosing their own successors, the Archonate had endured, a continuing body holding supreme authority, by now almost sacred to Terrans of whatever planet. But Martin Bernard had studied medieval history; the pattern of the past argued that no empire sustained itself indefinitely. In time each made its fatal mistake, and gave way to a successor.

Was the cycle of the Archonate ended now, Bernard asked himself as he waited for blastoff? A month ago such a thought would never have occurred. But perhaps McKenzie—one of the greatest Technarchs since Merriman, all admitted—had overreached himself, had committed the sin the Greeks knew as hybris, by spurring man into breaking the bounds of the limiting velocity. McKenzie’s rash thrust into interstellar space now threatened to bring war down on Terra—war whose outcome might shatter the peace of five centuries and cast the Archonate into limbo with the other discarded rulers of man’s eight thousand years.

Nakamura entered the cabin. “Commander Laurance says he’s ready to go. Everybody cradled down for acceleration already?”

Here we go homeward like whipped curs, Bernard thought.

He checked the straps of his protective cradle. They were bound fast.

The signal came not much later. With landing jacks and stabilizing fins retracted, the XV-ftl sat poised in its meadow, while ten miles away unheeding aliens built their colony. A thunder of ions drove the ship upward, until the green planet dwindled and became nothing but a dot against the flaming backdrop of its nameless sun. Within the ship, Bernard lay back, his body involuntarily tensing against the push of three gravities as the XV-ftl sprang away from the planet below.

Time passed. The sociologist did not think; to think meant to rehearse the catalogue of their humiliation, to repeat silently the account of their treatment at the hands of Zagidh and Skrinri and haughty Vortakel. He waited, mindlessly hanging in a void, as the ship’s velocity increased with each continuing instant of acceleration.

Acceleration ceased at last. Velocity became constant. They could relax.

Peterszoon entered their cabin to inform them that the conversion to no-space was imminent. The big Hollander, taciturn as always, conveyed the bare information and left. Peterszoon had made it quite clear from the start that he had no interest in this journey, even less in the four passengers. He had been ordered by the Technarch to serve in the crew, and serve he did; but the Technarch’s orders said nothing about serving with a smile.

Some time later, the warning gong began to sound. Bernard went tense. They were entering the no space void, which meant that less than a day hence they would be landing on Earth. He found no joy in the thought of homecoming. In the ancient days, he thought, a messenger who bore bad news was killed on the spot. We won’t be as lucky. We’ll go on living—known for all time as the men who let ourselves be walked over by the Norglans.

Just before conversion came, Bernard turned to catch a final glimpse of the solar system behind them. They had not quite left the vicinity of Star NGCR 185143; it glimmered on the screen with an appreciable disk the apparent size of an iron five-credit piece, and dimly visible against its brightness were the dark dots of occulting planets. Then the cabin lights flickered and the screen winked into featureless grayness. Bernard felt the pang of separation from the universe he knew.

Conversion had been made.

Now there would be seventeen hours of unending waiting. Bernard found his cabinet and took out a slim book. His symmetrical existence of teaching and reading and brandy-sipping seemed infinitely distant now, but he hoped to recapture some of the ease he had known before being plunged into this nerve-draining mission. Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing …

Bernard sighed in frustration and let the book slip shut. It was no use; no use at all.

“What are you reading?” Dominici asked.

“Not are. Were. I can’t concentrate.”

“What was it, then?”

“Shakespeare. Medieval English poet.”

“Yes, yes, I’ve heard of Shakespeare!” Dominici said. “He was one of the really great ones, wasn’t he?”

Bernard smiled mechanically. “The greatest, some think. I’ve got a book of his sonnets here. But it’s no use, reading them. I keep remembering that Shakespeare’s dead twelve centuries; the face of Skrinri keeps getting between me and the page.”

“Hand it here,” Dominici said. “I’ve never read any of that old stuff. Maybe I’ll like it.”

Shrugging, Bernard gave him the book. Dominici opened it at random, and almost immediately began to scowl. He looked up after a moment.

“I can’t read it! Don’t tell me you’ve been reading him in the original? What is this, Greek? Sanskrit?”

“English,” Bernard said. “It’s a hobby of mine, studying old languages. But go ahead; look at each word, pronounce it phonetically if you can. Shakespeare’s English isn’t that far removed from modern-day Terran. It just looks strange. But that’s the direct ancestor of our own language, you know.”

Dominici frowned, muttered a couple of words aloud experimentally, and gave up. “It’s hopeless. Even if I could figure out all the words, I’d never get the sense. Take it back.”

Bernard retrieved his book. Odd, he thought; he had taken naturally to old English, and read it without a hitch now. But, he had to admit, it was not really very much like contemporary Terran. Hundreds of years of transmat civilization had blended the languages of Earth into one homogeneous tongue, founded on English but vastly different.

It was strange to think of a time when men had spoken hundreds of different languages, thousands of subdialects. But so the world had been, not many centuries ago. Only the transmat, enabling a person to outstrip the lightning in his travels, ensured the continuing uniformity of Terran language and culture everywhere.

He put the book away. Concentration was impossible; too many extraneous fears intervened. His hands were cold with tension. He paced the narrow cabin. The viewscreen showed nothing but gray; it was impossible to tell that they were moving—but they were, incalculable strides each fragment of a moment, plunging on toward Earth.

Bernard did not want to see the Technarch McKenzie’s face when he received the news of the Norglan ultimatum. He wished there were some way of submitting a written report instead. But there would be no help for it; they would have to report in person. It would be an ugly little moment, Bernard was certain.

The cabin was silent. Havig was sunk in that impenetrable cloak of abstraction of his, communing with his God; no use seeking company there. Dominici had gone to sleep. Stone stared at the viewless vision screen, no doubt thinking of his shattered diplomatic career. A man who goes forth to negotiate a treaty and returns with an enemy ultimatum jammed down his gullet does not rise to the Archonate.

Bernard made his way forward, past the walls studded with rivets, past the galley, into the control cabin at the nose of the ship. The door was open. Within, he could see all five of them at work, parts of the same organism, extensions of the ship. For minutes, no one took notice of the sociologist as he stood at the entrance to the control cabin peering at the flashing lights, listening to the droning click of the computer. Then Laurance saw him. Turning, the Commander’s eyes narrowed; his face, Bernard thought, looked strangely rigid, almost tortured.

“Sorry, Dr. Bernard. We’re very busy. Would you mind remaining in your cabin?”

“Oh—of course. Sorry to intrude…”

Rebuked, Bernard returned to the passenger half of the ship. Nothing had changed. The clock showed that nearly fourteen hours of no-space travel remained.

He was growing hungry. But as the clock-hands crawled on, no one appeared from the crew to announce that it was meal-time. Bernard waited.

“Getting hungry?” Stone asked.

“Plenty. But they looked busy up front when I went fore,” Bernard said. “Maybe they can’t take time out for a meal break yet.”

“We’ll wait another hour,” Stone decided. “Then we eat without them.”

The hour went by, and half an hour more. Stone and Bernard went fore. Tiptoeing past the galley, Bernard glanced into the control cabin and saw the five crewmen as frantically busy as ever. Shrugging, he stole away again, unnoticed.

“They don’t look as if they plan to eat,” he told Stone; “we might as well help ourselves.”

“What about the other two?”

“Dominici’s asleep, Havig’s meditating. They can eat whenever they feel like it, after all.”

“You’re right,” Stone agreed.

They fell to, dishing out the synthetics. Nakamura kept the galley spotlessly, everything in its place. Staring into the storage cabinets, Bernard discovered with some surprise that the ship carried enough food to last for months. In case of emergency, he thought automatically. Then he checked himself. Emergency? For the first time he realized that the XV-ftl, was an experimental ship, that faster-than-light travel was in its puling infancy.

He prepared the synthetics with something less than Nakamura’s culinary skill, and they ate a silent meal. It was the seventh hour of no-space travel by the time they finished. In less than half a day, the XV-ftl would wink back into the familiar universe somewhere near the orbit of Pluto.

Returning to the cabin, Bernard settled himself in his bunk. Dominici had awakened. “Did I miss lunch?” he wanted to know.

“The crew’s too busy to take a break,” Stone said. “We made lunch ourselves. You were sound asleep, so we didn’t wake you.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Dominici went forward to see about his meal; after a moment, Havig followed him. Bernard lay back, nestling his head on his hands, and dozed for a while. When he woke, six hours remained; he was hungry again.

“You haven’t missed a thing,” Dominici assured him. “They’re awfully busy up front.”

“Still?” Bernard asked. He began to feel uneasy.

The hours trickled away. Three hours left, two, one. He counted minutes. The seventeen-hour no-space interim had expired. They ought to be converting back, but no news came from the control cabin. Conversion was twenty minutes overdue, thirty minutes. An hour.

“Do you think there’s some reason why we should spend more time in no-space on the way back than on the way out?” Stone asked.

Dominici shrugged. “In no-space theory almost anything goes. But I don’t like this. Not at all.”

When they were three hours past the conversion time, Bernard said through lips dry with tension: “Maybe we ought to go up front and find out what’s what?”

“Not yet,” Stone said. “Let’s be patient.”

They tried to be patient. Only Havig succeeded, sitting wrapped in his unbreakable calm. Another hour went by, more tortuously than any of the others. Suddenly the gong sounded, three times, reverberating through the entire ship.

“At last,” Bernard muttered. “Four hours late.”

The lights dimmed; the indefinable sensation of transition came over them, and the viewscreen blazed with light. They had returned to the universe!

Then Bernard frowned. The viewscreen…

He was no astronomer, but even so he spied the wrongness. These were not the constellations he knew; the stars did not look this way in the orbit of Pluto. That great blazing blue double, with its attendant circlet of smaller stars—he had never seen that formation before. Panic swirled coldly through him.

Laurance entered the cabin suddenly. His face was paper-white, his lips bloodless.

“What’s going on?” Bernard and Dominici demanded in the same instant.

Laurance said quietly, “Commend yourselves to whatever gods you happen to believe in. We went off course the moment we converted yesterday. I don’t know where we are —but it’s most likely better than a hundred thousand light-years from home.”