Collision Course

FIFTEEN

It was done. And, though the Archonate knew nothing of the treaty, every one of the nine Earthmen realized that what they had done was irrevocable.

Through some magic of their own, the Rosgollans had conjured up, out there in the meadow, a scale model of the island universe that contained Earth and Norgla. It drifted in midair, a spiral with two curving snakelike arms, composed of millions and millions of glowing points of light. The model, breathtaking in its white loveliness, looked authentic as it hung there, a flattened lens ten feet long, shining with a cold brilliance.

Suddenly, springing up within the galactic model, a line of green light picked out a sphere perhaps a foot in diameter, a glowing vacuole within the protozoan-shape that was the galactic model.

“This is the Terran sphere of dominion,” a Rosgollan voice silently informed.

An instant later a second sphere sprang into glowing life, this one red, of virtually the same size, and located halfway across the model.

“This is the Norglan sphere of dominion,” came the Rosgollan admonition.

Earthmen and Norglans stared at the model, and at the two puny stellar empires ringed out within it. They waited, knowing what was to come.

A searingly bright line of fierce violet zigzagged out across the model, dividing it from rim to core, lancing between the tight-packed stars to partition the galaxy into two roughly equal segments. The model looked now like a microorganism in the first stages of fission; the violent blaze of the violet boundary assailed all eyes. Bernard looked away; he saw the others doing the same.

Colors began to spread all across the model, the green light filling all the Terran half, the red streaming over all the Norglan suns. The Rosgollan said, “These shall be the everlasting boundaries of your dominions. Crossing them for any reason will bring immediate retribution from beyond your galaxy. You each are absolute masters within your own sectors, but there must be no trespassing.”

“We—we have no right to enter into a binding agreement without informing our government of the course of action,” Stone protested stammeringly. “We quite frankly lack the power to…”

“The arrangements concluded here will be binding,” replied the Rosgollan. “Let us not obscure the facts. Formal consent of high officials will not be necessary in this matter. This is not a treaty being arrived at by mutual negotiation; it is an imposition from without. The situation is clear. You will obey the establishment of the boundary line. No alternative is open to you.”

There it was in the open, Bernard thought. Treaties are made between powers of equal sovereignty. This was something different, a blunt command.

The Norglans, not very surprisingly, looked agitated by the open statement of intent. Skrinri declared, “You—order us to obey your decision…?”

“Yes. We order you. These are the boundaries. You will keep within them; and you will cease to threaten each other with war. We command this in the name of galactic harmony, and we will not tolerate deviation. Is that understood?”

Eleven figures stared dumbly at the model and at the eerie creatures that had created it. No one spoke, neither Earthman nor Norglan. Several seconds ticked by in silence, without a reply.

“Is that understood?” demanded the Rosgollan again, with some acerbity.

Someone had to speak, to admit what everyone already privately accepted as the dictates of necessity. Martin Bernard shrugged and said quietly, “Yes. We understand the situation.”

“And the men of Norgla?”

“We understand,” Skrinri said, echoing not only Bernard’s words but his tone of resignation.

“It is done, then.”

The divided model winked out.

“You will be returned to your home planets. There you will inform the heads of your governments of the existence of the boundary lines we have just created. You will warn your governments that any transgression of these boundaries will lead to instant punishment.”

It was done.

Irrevocably?

Unarguably?

Light swirled blindingly around the stolid, heavy figures of the Norglan negotiators, and immediately they hazed over and were gone. An instant later, most of the Rosgollans had been translated elsewhere the same way.

And a fraction of a second after that, the Earthmen felt a swathe of warm light engulf them—and, without any sensation of transition, they found themselves once again standing just outside their ship.

Out of the silence came a Rosgollan voice in gentle command.

“Enter your ship,” it ordered quietly. “We will restore you to the galaxy in which you belong.”

Bernard lifted his eyes momentarily, caught those of Laurance. The Commander looked baffled, blocked, humiliated. Laurance glanced away. Bernard did not look at anyone else. The entire group of Earthmen, silent, shamefaced, clambered one by one into the waiting ship.

Peterszoon, the last man to come aboard, activated the hatch controls, swinging the entry gate shut and dogging it tightly in place. There was the faint hiss as the pressure equalizers purred into action. Laurance and his crewmen filed through the ship to their quarters up front in the nose. Bernard, Havig, Stone, and Dominici went wearily aft, to the passenger cabin.

No one spoke.

The four men in the rear cabin took blastoff places and waited uncertainly, each averting his eyes from those of the man opposite him. The common feeling of depression, of supreme humiliation, dampened spirits.

The ship lifted almost immediately, without the slightest sensation of having blasted off. The vessel simply was detached from the ground and floated spaceward, as though escape velocity on Rosgolla were zero, and mass and inertia just so many meaningless words.

It was Stone who finally broke the clammy silence as the ship sprang upward.

“So that’s that,” he muttered bitterly, staring at the wall. “We’ve got quite a story to tell when we get home! I’ll really make a splash. The bold Earthmen encounter not one alien race but two, and the second one kicked us around a little harder than the other. But we sure came off third best in that little conference!”

Dominici shook his head in disagreement. “I wouldn’t say we did so badly.”

“No?” Stone challenged.

“Not at all,” Dominici maintained. “I’d say the Norglans came out a good sight poorer off than we did, after all was said and done. Don’t forget that originally the Norglans were claiming the entire universe except for our little sphere, before the Rosgallans stepped in. And now the blueskins are held down to a mere fifty-fifty split of one galaxy, nothing more!”

“I suppose you could call that a victory for us,” Stone said. “But that kind of reasoning can rationalize away anything.”

“And it’s assuming that the Norglans will abide by the dividing line,” Havig remarked.

“I think they will,” Bernard said. “It doesn’t seem to me that they have much of an alternative. They’ll have to stick to the agreement, whether they like it or not. These Rosgollans seem to have almost unlimited mental powers. They’ll probably be keeping an eye cocked at our galaxy, policing it and breaking up any trouble that might conceivably start over a boundary violation.”

“Policing our galaxy,” Stone said darkly. “That’s lovely, isn’t it? So we set out from Earth with a flourish of trumpets, as representatives of the universe’s dominant race, and we come back home policed into one little corner of our own galaxy. That isn’t going to be easy for the Archonate to swallow.”

“It won’t be easy for anyone to swallow,” Bernard said. “But the truth never is. And this is one bit of truth that’s bound to stick in any Earthman’s craw. The thing we’ve found out we didn’t know before is that we aren’t the universe’s dominant race; at least not yet, anyway. The Rosgollans and maybe some others out in the distant galaxies have an evolutionary start of perhaps five or six hundred thousand years on us. So we’ve been slapped back into our place—for a while. We were like a bunch of kids imagining that the universe was ours for grabs. Well, it isn’t, that’s all, and the Archonate and all the rest of the people of Earth will just have to get used to the idea.”

“Regardless, this is the greatest defeat Earth has suffered in her history,” Stone persisted.

“Defeat?” Bernard snorted. “Listen, Stone, do you call it a humiliating defeat if you slam your hand against a metal bulkhead and break your fingers? Sure, the bulkhead defeated your hand. It’ll do it every time. It’s in the fundamental nature of metal bulkheads to be stronger than bare fingers, and it’s ridiculous to moan about the philosophical aspects of the situation.”

“If I want to defeat a bulkhead, I don’t use my bare hands,” Stone replied. “I’d use a blowtorch. And I’d win ten times out of ten.”

“But we don’t have a blowtorch we can use on the Rosgollans,” Bernard said. “We just aren’t in their league. It’s in the nature of highly advanced races half a million years older than we are to be more powerful than we are. Why get upset about it?”

“Bernard is right,” Havig said in a quiet voice. “The great wheel of life keeps turning. Some day the Rosgollans will be gone from the universe, and we, in the twilight of our days, will watch other, younger, stronger races come brawling across the skies. And what will we do then? Just what the Rosgollans did to us: confine these races, for the sake of our own peace. But, perhaps, by then we will know Who has made us, and we will not act for our own sake.”

Sinking his head in his hands, Stone muttered, “What Bernard’s been saying all makes perfectly good sense on the abstract, intellectual level. I’m not trying to deny that. But come down to the realities of the situation. How do you go about telling a planet that thought it was the summit of creation that it’s very small potatoes indeed?”

“That’s going to be the Archonate’s problem, not ours,” Dominici said.

“What does it matter whose problem it is?” Stone demanded sharply. “This will set Earth in an uproar. It’s a planetary humiliation.”

“It’s a planetary eye-opening,” Bernard snapped. “It’ll destroy any lingering shred of complacency. For the first time we have some other races to measure ourselves against. We know that the Norglans are just about as good as we are, right now—and that the Rosgollans are a whole lot better. So we know we’ll have to progress, to keep abreast of the Norglans, to aim toward the level of the Rosgollans. And we’ll get there.”

Hernandez entered the cabin and stopped, looking about uncertainly at everyone.

“Am I interrupting something important?” he asked.

“What could be important now, anyway?” Stone asked in a dismal voice.

“We were just hashing over the implications of our new status,” Bernard explained. “Is there any sort of trouble up front, Hernandez?”

The crewman shook his head. “No, no trouble, Dr. Bernard. Commander Laurance sent me back to let you know that it seems the Rosgollans have returned us to the place where we got lost, and we’re about to convert into no-space and head for home.”

“But that can’t be,” Stone said.

Simultaneously Dominici gasped and said, “What? You mean we’re back in our own galaxy so fast? But…”

“That’s right,” Hernandez said quietly. “It’s only half an hour or so since we left Rosgolla, ship time. But we’ve come back.”

“Are you certain?” Bernard asked.

“The Commander’s positive.”

Hernandez turned and left. A tremor of cold awe shot through Bernard.

The ship, then, had crossed the galactic gulf in a mere matter of twenty or thirty minutes, thanks to the boost from the Rosgollans. It was a feat beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp.

Beyond the capacity of the human mind. But, Bernard realized, it might have been the simplest thing in the world for a race as advanced as the Rosgollans. An after-dinner stunt, a casual flip of a craft across thousands of light-years— hardly worth mentioning.

He felt profoundly uneasy.

Yet, even so, there was comfort. The Rosgollans were half a million years ahead, evolutionally. And they could work miracles. But how many accomplishments of man would seem like miracles to the man of only a few hundred years earlier? Not to mention man of half a million years.

Where were we half a million years ago? Bernard wondered. We were pounding our hairy chests, brachiating gaily through the trees, cooking our uncles for dinner, maybe even eating them raw if cooking hadn’t been invented yet.

And yet we came all the way from Pithecanthropus erectus to the transmat era in half a million years—picking up speed as we came. That’s a hell of a long journey in not really a hell of a long time. So who’s to say where we’ll be half a million years from now? Who can predict where we’ll be when we’re as old as the Rosgollans are now?

It was a warm, comforting kind of thought. For the first time since the long journey had begun, back in the hopeless wastes of Central Australia, Bernard felt a moment of certainty, of understanding man’s relation to the universe.

The new warmth flooded dizzyingly over him.

“Hey, Bernard. Bernard? Are you feeling all right?” Dominici asked.

“Uh—yes. Sure. Why do you ask?”

“You looked so queer all of a sudden. You got a kind of funny smile on your face for a second, a smile that I’ve never seen on you before.”

“I was—thinking about something,” he said quietly. “Some pieces fitted together. And I—well, I just felt good for a second. I still do.” He leaned forward. “Dom, tell me about the Norglans, biologically speaking. As much as you could figure out.”

Dominici frowned. “Well—for one thing, they’re obviously mammals.”

“Of course. How about their evolutionary decent?”

“They stem from some primate-like creature, I’m pretty certain. Of course, there are big differences, but that’s only to be expected across a gulf of twelve or fifteen thousand light-years. The eyes, the double elbow—these are things we don’t have. But other than that, at least on external evidence alone, I’d say they were pretty much like us.”

“A younger race than we are, would you say?” Bernard went on.

Uncertainty hooded Dominici’s eyes. “Younger? No, I wouldn’t say that. I’d be inclined to say they were an older race than we are.”

“Why do you say that?”

Dominici shrugged. “Call it a hunch. They seem settled in their ways, stratified almost. The difference couldn’t be much—two or three thousand years, maybe—but I have a definite feeling they’ve been civilized longer than we have.”

“I tend to agree,” Havig said from his corner of the cabin. “From what little I could catch of that complicated language of theirs, I’d say it’s a highly evolved one—the sort of language a race might have been speaking for a couple of thousand years. But what’s on your mind, Bernard? Why the sudden questions?”

Bernard shrugged. “I’m piecing together something to tell the Technarch when we get back,” he said flatly, and made no other attempt at an explanation.

The gong sounded, signalling conversion. Conversion came; not long after, Nakamura came aft to let the passengers know that this time the ship was square on course, and that a meal was about to be served.

They ate quietly. There was no reason to be jubilant after such a mission to the stars. They were all conscious that they were returning to Earth after a mission that had ended in unexpected diminution of man’s place in the universe. The news they bore would hardly be welcome to the people of the Terran worlds or to that hard, inflexibly proud man who had impelled them to take this journey. Harsh truths are rarely welcomed.

Havig remained in the galley to give Nakamura a hand with the job of clearing away the meal. Bernard returned to the cabin with Stone and Dominici. A hush had fallen over them once again. Each minute, now, brought them closer to Earth, to the reckoning with the Technarch.

Stone sat quietly on his bunk, his hands covering his face. Bernard looked up suddenly and realized that the pudgy diplomat was weeping.

He went over to him.

“Stone. Snap out of it!”

“Leave me alone!” was the muffled reply.

“Come on, knock it off…”

“Go away.”

“Dammit,” Bernard said hoarsely, “what are you crying about, anyway? Does the fact that Earthmen aren’t the big cheeses we used to think we were upset you so damned much? Or is it the fact that you’re probably out of a job in the Archonate that’s digging into you?”

Stone looked up, white-faced, red-eyed, with the shocked look of a man whose most carefully hidden secret has been punctured. “How dare you say that…”

“It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

“What are you trying to…”

“Admit it,” Bernard said in a deliberately harsh voice. “Face the truth. It’s a habit we all could stand to cultivate around here.”

The diplomat looked as though he’s been given five strokes with a neural whip. He shrank into himself and after a moment’s silence said in a soft, distant voice, “All right, it’s the truth. I won’t try to hide it any more. For twenty-five years I’ve been training for the Archonate, and it’s all shot to hell now. I’ve got no career left. I’m nothing but a used-up shell. Am I supposed to be happy about the way things have turned out? Do you think they would ever pick as Archon the very man who brought back the crushing news that we— that we…”

Stone could not go on.

He started to blubber again. Bernard felt uncomfortable and helpless, as he stood there watching the fleshy shoulders shake uncontrollably.

I might as well let him cry, Bernard thought. Maybe his career’s finished and maybe it isn’t, but he can use the nervous release anyway. God knows, we all can.

Bernard returned to his bunk. After a while he saw Stone rise, wash his face, dry his eyes, and jab his arm with a spraytube of a sedative. The diplomat lay down again and was asleep almost at once. Bernard remained awake, watching the grayness of the vision screen, watching the steadily advancing hands of the clock. His mood was a depressed one, yet not as bleak as it might have been. It had been, he knew, a valuable voyage—for him, for everyone on Earth. Earth had learned some things about itself that it desperately had needed to find out—and so had Martin Bernard. Some of his actions surprised him, as he looked back. His burst of sympathy and understanding for Havig, for instance.

The trip had broadened him, had extended his knowledge of himself and of others. He could look back now and see the Martin Bernard of the recent past in a cold, clear new perspective.

What he saw hardly pleased him.

He saw a self-centered, almost irritatingly selfish man, with a streak of cruelty well camouflaged by his outward amiable ways. His hatchet job on Havig’s article, for instance, had not been an expression of scholarly dissent as much as it had been an attack on a philosophy of life that called his own hedonistic ways into question. His relationship with his wife, too, he saw with uncomfortable clarity: it was not that he was not “born” to be a good husband, but simply that he had not been willing to work at it. She was no shrew, merely a woman who wanted to share her husband’s inner life and had been shut completely away from it.

Bernard stared steadily ahead. This close confinement, away from the lulling influences of his cozy nest at home, had forced him in on himself, compelled him to take a healing look at the real self enclosed in a shell of complacency.

Earth was in for the same kind of rough awakening, Bernard thought. He wondered if the people in general would profit from the jolt of truth, as he felt he had, or if they would angrily throw up defense mechanisms to keep the true barb from sinking in. Bernard frowned. He had his doubts.

And time was running out, now. Only twelve hours remained until conversion time. The clock hands moved, slowly, inexorably.

Ten hours.

Eight.

Six.

Four.

Twenty minutes.

The last minutes took the longest. Bernard’s face was set in a rigid mask, his eyeballs throbbing as he watched the clock. No one had spoken in hours.

The gongs sounded, finally, their resonance booming through the cabin like an annunciation of Judgment. The moment of conversion came. The vision screen brightened as the faster-than-light ship twisted out of the unknown void and crashed across the barrier into the familiar universe.

The message came aft from Laurance, in slow, measured tones. “We’re crossing the orbit of Neptune at this moment, heading inward. I’ve radioed ahead to Earth and they got the message. They know we’re coming home.”