Collision Course

FIVE

The ship swung “downward,” cutting across the ecliptic plane to seek out the orbit of the fourth of the golden star’s eleven worlds. Assuming an observation orbit five hundred fifty miles above the planet, the XV-ftl zipped round four times before spying the alien settlement. It lay in the shadowed nightside of the planet. The encroaching path of brightness, peeling the night away from the turning planet, told that the alien settlement was not many hours from dawn. In the rear cabin, Martin Bernard and his fellow negotiators lay strapped in, shielded against the atmospheric buffeting of landing, waiting the minutes out as the XV-ftl dropped in ever-narrowing spirals toward the darkness below. Bernard felt strangely helpless as the ship coiled through its landing orbit. Here I am, he thought, trussed into a mattress like a child in the womb waiting to be born. And no more capable of landing this ship than a child in the womb is of delivering himself and cutting the umbilicus.

Queasiness of the stomach assailed him. His life, all their lives, lay in the hands of five bloodshot, tired men. A miscalculation in somebody’s computations and they might smash into the unnamed planet below at fifty thousand miles a second. Or they might miss the planet altogether, have to come back and make another nervewracking pass at it.

Bernard swiveled his head backward until his eyes met Stone’s. The pudgy diplomat’s face was pale and glossy with sweat. But he managed to grin.

“I don’t go much for this spaceship travel,” Bernard said. “How about you?”

“Give me transmat every time,” Stone murmured. “But we can’t very well be choosy this trip, eh?”

“Guess not,” Bernard admitted. “No choice of accomodations for us.”

He fell silent again, reminded once again of how little scope for free action a human being really had. The dully deterministic fact had been hammered home to him in his undergraduate days, when he had first encountered the damnably unanswerable set of sociometric equations that covered most of man’s traits and behavior patterns. There’s hardly any choice. We’re prisoners of—well, call it necessity for lack of a neater term. The only choices we get are low-level ones; and maybe we aren’t even really choosing then.

The ship jounced down through the atmosphere. It was a bumpy drop; Bernard was grateful for the cradle he nestled in. He had never realized that spaceship travel was as crude and as clumsy as this. A transmat trip was clean, sharp, like the blade of a microtome: you stepped in, you stepped out, and you were there. None of this tiresome business of acceleration and deceleration, matching velocities, actions-and-equal-but-opposite reactions.

He smiled, thinking how little he actually knew about the physics of space travel. He, who had spent his honeymoon on a green pleasure-world in the Sirius system, who had vacationed on planets orbiting Beta Centauri and Bellatrix and Eta Ursae Majoris, was hazier on the Newtonian facts of life than most schoolboys building their first model rockets. Blame it on the transmat, he thought. No one cared how a rocketship worked when he could step through cool green flame and exit four hundred light-years from home.

Bernard eyed the planet growing in the viewscreen. They were too close to regard it as a sphere, now; it had flattened tremendously, and nearly a third of its area was outside the screen’s subtended angle of vision.

As the XV-ftl whirled past dayside, Bernard caught glimpses of great continents lying in a blue-green sea like slabs of meat against a table. All was motionless, even the fleecy wisps of cloud far below, the dark blotch of a raging storm. Then they were plunged into night, and only indistinct shapes could be seen.

Emerging into dayside again, now the bright threads of the bigger rivers could be picked out. One vast waterway seemed to travel diagonally across the biggest continent, cutting a channel from northeast to southwest and proliferating into hundreds of smaller streams. Mountain ranges rose like buckled humps in the far west and north. Most of the continent was a verdant green, shading into a darker color toward the north and in the highlands.

Closing his eyes, Bernard choked back his dizziness and waited for the moment of landing.

It came some time later; he realized he had dozed, an after-effect of the deceleration pills Nakamura had handed out at the last meal. But he woke suddenly, as if having a premonition of arrival, and, moments afterward, he sensed a gentle thump. That was all.

It had been a perfect landing.

The voice of Laurance came over the intercabin speaker: “We’ve made our landing without trouble. Our landing-point is some ten or twelve miles east of the alien settlement. The sun is due to rise here in about an hour. We’ll be leaving the ship as soon as routine area decontamination is carried out.”

The routine decontamination took only a few minutes. Then, once all radiation products incident to the landing had been sluiced away, the hatch slid open and the air of another world came filtering into the ship.

He stood at the lip of the hatch now, testing the air. It was much like Earth’s; but there was a fraction more of oxygen in it, not enough of an overplus to jeopardize health but just enough to give the air a rich, heady quality. It was almost like breathing fine white wine. He felt, after a few inhalations, a confidence that had deserted him in the dark hours just before landing.

“Let’s go, Dr. Bernard,” Peterszoon called to him from below. “We can’t wait all day.”

“Sorry,” Bernard said. He reddened and hastily clambered down the catwalk to the ground. The five crewmen were there already. Stone, Dominici, and Havig followed.

A fresh morning breeze, slightly chill, swept down across the meadow in which they had landed. The sky was still gray, and a few last stars of morning still glimmered faintly. But pink streaks of dawning were beginning to splash across the sky. The temperature, Bernard estimated, was in the forties or fifties: promise of a warm morning. The air had the transparent freshness one found only on a virgin world where the belch of a furnace was unknown.

It might have been Earth on some ninth-century morning, thought Bernard; but there were differences, subtle but none the less positive ones. The grass under their feet, only to take one; its blue-green blades sprouted triple from the stalk, twisting round each other in a complex little pattern before springing upward. No grass on Earth had ever grown in such a way.

The trees—looming evergreens two hundred feet high, their boles a dozen feet thick at the base—were different, too. Cones three feet long dangled from the nearest; its bark was pale yellow, ruffled by horizontal striations; its leaves were broad glossy green knives, a foot long, two inches wide. Crickets chittered underfoot, but when Bernard caught sight of one he saw it was a grotesque little creature three or four inches long, green with beady golden eyes and a savage little beak. Great oval toadstools with table-like tops a foot or more in diameter sprouted everywhere in the meadow, bright purple against the blue-green. Dominici knelt to touch one and it crumbled like a dream when his finger grazed the fungus’ rim.

For the long moment, no one spoke. Bernard felt a sort of tingle of awe, and knew the others were sharing his emotion; the wonder of setting foot on a planet where mankind and civilization had not yet begun to work changes. This was the planet as it had come from the maker’s hand, and even a nonbeliever like Bernard could respond to that.

The men were silent, hearing the cool wind whistle sighingly through the towering trees, hearing the unseen harmonious symphony of crickets and the awakening, dawn-hungry birds, and perhaps the deeper cry of some unknown forest beast thrashing through the black thicket to the south.

And then the wonder faded.

This world was not unmarred, Bernard thought.

Perhaps mankind had not yet set down a colony here— but others had.

It was a grim thing to call to mind in the midst of this primeval beauty, the ugly reminder of their purpose in coming here. Bernard’s expression darkened. How could a world this lovely be a menace to Earth? The world itself was not the menace, he thought. It merely symbolized the threat of two colliding cultures.

Laurance cut into his mood, saying quietly, “We’ll proceed to the alien village on foot. There are two landsleds aboard the ship, but I’m not going to use them.”

“Is the hike necessary?” Bernard said.

“I feel it is,” Laurance replied, hiding none too well his annoyance of Bernard’s love of comfort. “I feel it might look too much like an armed invasion to the aliens if we came rolling up inside the landsleds. We might never get a chance to tell them we were friendly.”

“In that case, what about weapons?” Dominici said. “Do you have enough to spare for the four of us? If we have to defend ourselves, we…”

“Weapons?” Laurance repeated, startled. “Do you really expect to carry weapons?”

“Well…” the biophysicist stammered, thrown off balance by Laurance’s tone. “Of course I thought we’d be armed, just as a precautionary measure. Alien beings—you yourself said they might be surprised when we approach them…”

Laurance grimly tapped the magnum pistol at his side. “I’m carrying the only weapon we’ll need.”

“But…”

“If the aliens react to us with hostility,” said Laurance in a dry voice, “you may quite possibly all become martyrs to the cause of Terran diplomacy. I hope each of you is thoroughly reconciled to that fact right here and now. I’d ten times as much rather see us all shot to ashes by alien blasters than to have some jumpy negotiator fly off the handle and pump bullets into them just because one of his private neuroses has been activated. It isn’t wise to make a ten-mile overland journey through unknown territory without some sort of weapon, which is why I’m carrying this. But I’m damned if I’m going to let all of us walk into that alien camp looking like an invasion party.” He glanced around, his eyes coming to rest in turn on Dominici, Havig, Stone, and Bernard. “Is that perfectly clear?” Laurance asked.

No one replied. Uncomfortably, Bernard scratched his cheek and tried to look as though he were reconciled to the idea of martyrdom. He wasn’t.

“No objections,” Laurance said, more relaxedly. “Good. “We’re agreed, then. I carry the gun; I’m alone answerable for the consequences of my carrying it. Believe me, I’m not worried about my survival so much as I am about someone else’s rash actions. Are there any other questions?”

Hearing none, Laurance shrugged. “Very well. We’ll set out at once.”

He turned, checking his position against a tiny compass that was embedded, along with several other indicators, in the sleeve of his leather jacket, and nodded toward the west. Without further preamble or prologue, he began to walk.

Nakamura and Peterszoon fell in wordlessly behind him, Clive and Hernandez back of them. The five men trudged off at a good clip, none of them looking around to see if the negotiators were following.

Shrugging, Bernard scurried after the five rapidly retreating spacemen, Dominici jogging alongside him. Stone followed, with Havig, reserved and self-contained as ever, bringing up the rear.

“They don’t treat us as if we’re very important,” Bernard complained to Dominici. “They seem to forget that we’re the reason they’re here.”

“They don’t forget it,” Dominici growled. “They just feel contempt for lazy Earthlubbers like us. They resent our existence. ‘Transmat people,’ they call us, with a sort of arrogant sneer in their voices. As though there’s something really morally wrong about taking the quickest possible route between two points.”

“Only insofar as it weakens the body’s capacity for endurance,” Havig said quietly from the rear. “Anything which makes us less fit to bear the burden of earthly existence is morally wrong.”

“Taking the transmat does breed some bad habits,” Bernard said, surprised to find himself on the same side as Havig for a change. “We lose a sense of appreciation of the universe. Since the transmat was invented we’ve completely forgotten what the fact of distance really means. We don’t think of time as a function of distance any more; they do. And to the extent that we can’t control our impatience, we’re weaklings in a spaceman’s eyes.”

“And all of us weaklings in God’s eyes,” Havig said. “But some of us more prepared to go to Him than others.”

“Shut up,” Dominici said without rancor. “We might all be going to Him in a very short time. Don’t remind me.”

“Are you afraid of dying?” Havig asked.

“Just annoyed by the thought of not getting done everything I’d like to,” Dominici said. “Let’s get off the topic.”

“And let’s stay off it,” Bernard said vehemently, “That one-track philosopher back there is going to peddle piety once too often, and…”

“Watch it,” Stone murmured warningly.

They fell silent. The path was on a slight upgrade, and despite the tiny extra percentage of oxygen in the air Bernard soon found himself puffing and panting. He had made a point of keeping himself in trim with a weekly visit to an exercise house in Djakarta, but now he was speedily discovering the measurable psychological difference between doing pushups in a gym under relaxed conditions and climbing a steady upgrade on an alien world.

Anxiety toxins were flooding his body now, willy-nilly. The poison of fear added to the fatigue of his muscles, slowing him down. He dropped back a little, letting Dominici move ahead. Once, he stumbled, and Havig caught his elbow to steady him; when he looked around Bernard saw the Neopuritan grin briefly and heard him say, “All of us stumble on our paths, friend.”

Bernard was too weary to retort. Havig seemed to have an unearthly knack for turning even the most minor incident into an occasion for homily. Or, Bernard wondered wearily, what if Havig were only spoofing, parodying himself much of the time in a ponderous kind of humor? No, he thought, Havig didn’t have a scrap of humor anywhere in his huge frame. When he said something he meant it.

Bernard pushed ahead. Laurance and his men, moving along up front, never seemed to flag. They strode on like men in seven-league boots, clearing a way through the sometimes impassable brush that blocked the path; detouring skillfully to circle a fallen tree whose man-high trunk, already overgrown with yellow fungus, prevented advance; pausing to estimate the depth of a dark, swiftly flowing stream before plunging across through water that sometimes rose as high as the tops of their hip-boots.

He was beginning to lose his appreciation of this planet’s wild beauty. Even beauty can pall, especially under circumstances of discomfort. The blazing glory of purple flowers a foot across no longer registered on Bernard. The sleek grace of the white, cat-like creatures that bolted across their paths like streaks of flame no longer pleased him. The raucous, almost obscene cries of the birds in the towering trees no longer seemed amusing, but merely insulting.

Bernard had never realized in any concrete way that the abstract term “ten miles” meant quite so many weary steps. His feet felt numb, his calves stiff and throbbing, his thighs already beginning to develop a charley-horse that bid fair to double him up. And they had hardly begun to walk, he thought glumly. He felt ready to collapse, after only half an hour’s march.

Think we’re almost there?” he asked Dominici.

The stocky biochemist wrinkled his face in good-hearted scorn. “You kidding? We haven’t walked more than two and a half, three miles at most. Relax, Bernard. There’s plenty going ahead.”

Bernard nodded. A pace of ten minutes per mile was probably generous, he thought. Most likely they had done no more than two miles—a fifth or a sixth of the journey. And he was tired already.

But there was no help for it but to plug gamely on. The day had all but begun, now; the sky was bright and the sun seemed hidden just below the distant trees, biding its moment until bursting forth. The air had grown considerably warmer, too, the temperature climbing well into the sixties. Bernard had opened his jacket. He dipped frequently into his canteen, hoping the water would last him the round trip. Their last time here, Laurance and his men had tested the water and found it to be unobjectionable H₂O, presumably readily drinkable. But there had been no time for elaborate checks on microorganic life. Improbable though it was that a nonterrestrial organism could have serious effects on a Terran metabolism, Bernard was not minded to take chances.

At the end of the first hour they rested, leaning against the massive stumps of fallen trees.

“Tired?” Laurance asked.

Stone nodded; Bernard grunted his assent. A twinkle appeared in Laurance’s eyes. “So am I,” he admitted cheerfully. “But we’ll keep going.”

The sun rose finally a few minutes after they had resumed their trek. It burst into the sky gloriously, a young sun radiant in its youth. The temperature continued to climb; it was above seventy, now. Bernard realized bleakly that it was likely to reach ninety or better by high noon. He remembered that medieval jingle: Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. He smiled at the thought. No more than once or twice a year did he think of himself as an Englishman, even though he was Manchester born and London bred. That was another effect of a transmat civilization; it provided such marvelous motility that no one really thought of himself as tied to one nation, one continent, even one world. Only in odd little moments of sudden insight did it occur to Bernard to regard himself as an Englishman, and thus in some nebulous way heir to the traditions of Alfred and William and Richard the Lion-Hearted and Churchill and the other titans of the misty past.

Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. Dr. Martin Bernard flicked sweat from his forehead and grimly forced his legs to continue carrying him forward.