Collision Course

THIRTEEN

The planet of the Rosgollans was not at all as Bernard had expected it to be. His idea of the home of a super-race was a kind of super-Earth, with vaulting burnished towers springing to the skies, meticulously planned parks providing contrast to the urban scene, flexibridges linking buildings at heights dizzying to the eye.

He was wrong.

Perhaps the Rosgollans had had such things once; in any event, they had long since discarded the empty majesty of massive cities. The scene that lay before the Earthmen, as they left the ship—which had floated down, feather-light, in defiance of all laws of inertia and mass—was one of pastoral serenity.

Gentle green hills rolled out to the horizon. Dotting the green here and there were the pastel tones of small houses that seemed to sprout as organically from the ground as the low, stubby trees. There was no sign of industry, none of transportation.

“Just like fairyland,” Dominici said softly.

“Or like Paradise,” murmured Havig.

Bernard said, “It’s the post-technological phase of civilization, I’m sure. Remember the withering-away of the state that the ancient Marxists were forever trumpeting about? Well, this is it, I’m sure.” He realized he was speaking in a hushed whisper, as though this were a museum or a house of worship.

The nine of them stood together not far from the ship, waiting for a Rosgollan to put in an appearance. The air was sharp, with an alien tang to it, but it felt good to the lungs. A coolish breeze blew in from the hills. The sun was high in the sky, and looked redder, cooler than was the sun of Earth.

Just when they were beginning to grow impatient, a Rosgollan appeared, winking into view out of nowhere between one instant and the next.

“Teleportation,” Bernard murmured. “Even better than a transmat; you don’t need a mechanical rig.”

It was impossible to tell whether the Rosgollan was the same one that had come to them aboard the ship. This was about of a size with that other, but its features and body were partially concealed by the blur of light that attended these people wherever they went.

“We shall go to the others,” said the Rosgollan in its soft unspeaking voice.

The golden glow suddenly enswaddled them all; Bernard felt a moment of womblike warmth, and then the light dropped away, and the ship vanished.

They were inside one of the alien houses. The Rosgollan said, “Be comfortable. The interrogation is about to begin.”

“Interrogation?” Laurance asked. “What kind of interrogation? What are you planning to do with us, anyway?”

“You will come to no harm, Commander Laurance,” was the soft reply.

Bernard tugged at Laurance’s arm. “Better just relax and take things as they come,” he whispered. “Arguing with these people won’t do a bit of good.”

Despite himself, he smiled. Rising defiantly to tell the Rosgollans off was something like an ancient Roman defying a fusion bomb by shouting at it, ” Civis Romanus sum! Hands off! I am a Roman citizen!” The bomb would pay little attention; neither, Bernard suspected, would these Rosgollans. But he felt a fundamental surety that these beings of light would not be capable of bringing about any harm.

The Earthmen made themselves comfortable. There was no furniture in the room, only soft red cushions, on which they sat. Although the cushions were marvelously comfortable, and seemed to invite reclining, Bernard and the others remained sitting tensely upright.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, there were three more Rosgollans in the room. Looking from one to the next, Bernard could see no discernible difference; they were as identical as though all had been stamped from the same mold.

“The interrogation will now begin,” came the serene word from one (or was it all?) of them.

“Don’t answer a thing!” Laurance snapped suddenly. “We don’t want to give them any vital information. Remember, we’re prisoners here, no matter how well they happen to treat us!”

Despite Laurance’s outburst, the interrogation began. There was nothing Laurance could do to prevent it. Not a word was spoken, not even in their peculiar mental voice; but, beyond doubt, there was a flow of information. The Rosgollans were simply drawing what they wanted to know, without troubling to ask.

The interrogation seemed to last only an instant, though Bernard was not sure: perhaps it took hours, but the hours were shrunken to a point in time. He could not tell. But he felt the outflow of information.

The four Rosgollans drew everything from him: his childhood, his disastrous first marriage, his academic career, his interests and crochets, his second marriage, his unlamented divorce. All this they took from him in an instant, examined, discarded as being personal and therefore of only incidental interest.

In the next layer they drew from him the summons from the Technarch, the journey to the Norglan colony, the unsatisfactory meeting with the Norglans, the bungled voyage home.

Then it was over. The tendril of thought the Rosgollans had inserted into the brains of the Earthmen snapped back. Bernard blinked, stunned a little by the snapping of the contact. He felt drained, hollow, exhausted. He felt as though his brain had been drawn forth, examined very carefully, and put back into place.

And the Rosgollans were laughing.

There was no sound in the room, and, as ever, the faces of the strange beings were veiled in impenetrable light. But the impression of laughter hung in the air. Bernard felt his face grow red, without quite knowing why he felt shame. There had been nothing in his mind of which he was ashamed. He had lived his life, sought the ends he thought desirable, cheated no man, wronged no one intentionally. But the Rosgollans were laughing.

Laughing at me, he wondered? Or at someone else here? Or at all of us, at all the human race?

The unheard laughter died away. The Rosgollans came close to each other; their fields of light seemed to coalesce strangely.

“You’re laughing at us!” Laurance cried belligerently. “Laughing, you damned superior beings!”

Bernard touched his arm again. “Laurance…”

The alien reply was gentle and perhaps a trifle self-reproachful. “Yes, we are amused. We ask your forgiveness, Earthmen, but we are amused!”

Again the laughter rang out silently. Bernard realized that these Rosgollans were not quite the noble and mature beings he had been regarding them as. They could laugh at the struggles of a younger race. It was a patronizing laugh. Bernard frowned uncertainly, trying to fit the laughter into the culture-pattern he was constructing for the Rosgollans. Angels did not patronize, he thought. And until this moment he had regarded them almost as angelic, with their auras of light and their serenity of motion and their seemingly boundless powers of mind. But angels would not laugh at mortals that way.

“We will leave you alone a while,” the Rosgollans said. The light vanished. The earthmen turned to look at each other dazedly.

“So that’s what it’s like to be interrogated,” Dominici said. “I could feel them prowling around in my head—and I couldn’t shut them out. Imagine it—fingers stroking your bare brain!” He shuddered at the memory.

“So now we’re pets,” said Laurance bitterly. “I guess the Rosgollans will come from all over the universe to play with us.”

“Why are they doing all this?” Hernandez demanded. “Why did they have to drag us down here and toy with us?”

“More important,” said Dominici. “How are we going to get out of here?”

“We aren’t,” said Bernard in a flat voice. “Not unless the Rosgollans decide to let us go. We aren’t exactly masters of our own fate.”

“You’re turning into a defeatist, Bernard,” Dominici said warningly. “Ever since the moment these things first grabbed hold of the ship, you’ve been taking the blackest possible interpretation of everything.”

“I’m just looking at things realistically. There’s nothing to be gained by deluding ourselves. We’re in a mess. How are we going to escape, Dominici? You answer that. Where’s the Ship?”

“Why—uh…”

Dominici paused. With a cold frown on his face, he walked to the door of the room. The door obediently drew back as he approached, and he stepped out, into the open. The others followed him through the obliging doorway and into the outdoors.

Green hills rolled to the horizon in gentle undulations.

Fleecy clouds broke the harsh metallic blueness of the sky.

There was no sign of the ship.

None at all.

Bernard shrugged meaningfully. “You see, we might be anywhere on this planet. Anywhere at all. Five, ten, even fifteen thousand miles from the ship. Am I being defeatist? How are we going to get back? By transmat? Teleportation? On foot? Which direction do we go? I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I just don’t think we’ve got any way of getting free.”

“So we’re prisoners, then,” Dominici said bitterly. “Prisoners of these—these super-beings!”

“Even if we could reach the ship,” said Havig, “they would only bring us back, the same way they brought us here originally. Bernard’s right. We are totally at their mercy. We cannot alter that.”

“Why don’t you pray?” Stone asked.

Havig merely shrugged. “I have never ceased praying. But I fear we have fallen into a situation which God has designed for us, and from which He will not free us until His purpose is attained.”

Bernard knelt in the meadow just outside the building. He snatched up a stalk of saw-edged grass with a snapping motion of his hand, taking a perverse pleasure in the slight sting of the grass cutting into his skin.

It was a painful business, this being gently wafted to Rosgolla. It struck at the center of a man’s soul to take hold of him this way, to render him completely helpless, to keep him in this sort of smiling bondage.

Bernard clenched and unclenched his fists angrily. He thought back across only a short span of time to the easy-living dilettante whose self-centered life had been punctured by the Technarch’s call. Then I sat in my vibrochair and lived my own quiet life. And now I am a representative of Earth in who knows what macrocosmic judging?

“Hey!” Dominici exclaimed. “Food!”

Bernard turned. He caught a glimpse of a dying light, and, spread out on the grass in front of the house, he saw trays of food. Hunger assailed him, and he realized they were far from the ship, far from their own Earthman foods, with no immediate likelihood of returning.

“We might as well dig in,” he said. “The worst it can do is kill us.”

He picked up a small golden cake and nibbled it experimentally. It literally melted in his mouth, flowing down his gullet like honey. He ate another, then turned his attention to blue gourd-like vegetables, to a crystal pitcher of clear yellow wine, to round translucent white fruits the size of cherries. It was all delicious, and it was impossible to suggest that such delicate foods might be poisonous to a Terran metabolism. He ate his fill and wandered away, stretching out on the grass.

The sun was dropping in the heavens now. Near the horizon a small moon could be seen, low in the late-afternoon sky, visible as a tiny flat pearl against the darkening blue. It was a scene of simple beauty, as the meal had been simple, as the few Rosgollan buildings he had seen were simple. That simplicity alone argued for the great antiquity of these people. They had gone past the cultural stage of finding virtue in size and complexity, into the serene mature era of clean lines and uncluttered horizones. Bernard wondered how numerous they were. If they lived scattered as sparsely as the view indicated, there could not be many of them on this world—but perhaps there were thousands of Rosgollan worlds strung like beads through space, each with its few thousand inhabitants.

He could find pleasure in such a life, he who had enjoyed solitude and quiet, the peace of a fishing preserve on a young colony, the privacy of his own flat in London, the silence of his study-retreat in the Syrtis Major.

“What do they want with us?” Hernandez was asking.

“We amuse them,” Laurance said. “Maybe they’ll grow tired of us sooner or later, and let us go.”

“Let us go where?” Nakamura said quizzically. “We are more than one hundred thousand light-years from home. Or will the Rosgollans show us how to find our way back, when they let us go?”

“If they let us go,” Dominici corrected.

“They won’t keep us here long,” Bernard said, breaking his long silence.

“Oh? How do you know?”

“Because we don’t fit into the scheme of things here,” the sociologist replied. “We’re blotches on the landscape. The Rosgollans have their own tranquil lives to lead. Why should they install a bunch of barbarians on their quiet planet to stir things up? No, they’ll let us go when they’re through with us. I hardly think that these people are the zookeeper type.”

The night was falling rapidly now. It was an old world, Bernard thought; an old race, an old sun, short days and long nights.

Unfamiliar stars began to poke through the twilight’s gray haze. Later, when the sharp darkness had replaced the vague twilight, it would be possible to see the island universe in which Earth’s sun was merely an indistinguishable dot of light.

Darkness came on with a rush. The Earthmen once again entered the little building provided for them; a warm glow of light made it more cheery, and it seemed proof against the chill growing outside.

“What do we do?” Dominici asked, of nobody in particular. “Sack out and wait for morning?”

“Is there anything else we can do?” Havig demanded. “We have no very great choice of diversions. We can sleep, and we can pray, and we can think.”

“Pray for us, Havig,” said Laurance quietly. “Talk to that God of yours, get Him to arrange for our return trip home.”

Bernard said, “I don’t think he can do that, Commander. Don’t Neopuritans believe that it’s irreverent to ask for special favors?”

Havig flashed one of his rare smiles. “You are both right and you are wrong, friend Bernard. We feel it an impertinence to approach Him for worldly goods, for luxuries, for power. This is not prayer; prayer is communication, understanding, love. Not begging. But, on the other hand, to pray for our welfare, our salvation—this is hardly irreverent. He wants us to ask for whatever we think we need, but then to leave it up to Him and trust that when His will is done, all will be well.”

“But that’s begging, isn’t it?” Bernard objected.

Havig shrugged. “In His eyes, we are all supplicants in great need. I will gladly pray for all of us, as I have been doing from the first.”

“Right, pray for us,” Laurance said gruffly. “We need all the help we can get.”

Some of the men settled themselves on the cushions as if settling down for the night. Bernard walked to the edge of the single room, leaned against the wall, and watched it turn transparent for three feet on either side of him to provide him with a window.

He peered outward, upward. The strange stars blazed down. He sought for Earth’s galaxy, but it did not seem to be visible from this part of the planet. Feeling suddenly stifled by the magnitude of his distance from home, Bernard reeled away from the window and threw himself down on the nearest cushion. He jammed his eyes tightly together. His lips moved as if of their own accord.

He recovered his self-control after an instant and thought in quiet wonder, I prayed! By the Hammer, I actually prayed to go home!

The prayer had been like a release. The knot of tension that had been forming for hours within him let go its hold. He cradled his head on his folded arms, kicked off his shoes, and was asleep within seconds.