The Godmakers

Chapter Five

Umbo Stetson paced the landing control bridge of his scout cruiser. His footsteps grated on a floor that was the rear wall of the bridge during flight. Now, the ship rested on its tail fins—all four hundred glistening red and black meters of it. The open ports of the bridge looked out on the jungle roof of the planet Gienah III some one hundred and fifty meters below. A butter-yellow sun hung above the horizon perhaps an hour from setting.

Gienah was a nasty situation and he didn’t like using an untested operative in such a place. It concerned him that this particular operative had been drafted into the I-A by a sector chief named Umbo Stetson.

I draft him and I send him out to get killed, Stetson thought. He glanced across the bridge at Lewis Orne, now a junior I-A field operative with a maiden diploma. Trained… and intelligent, but inexperienced.

“We ought to scrape this planet clean of every living thing on it,” Stetson muttered. “Clean as an egg!” He paused in his round of the bridge, glared out the open starboard port into the fire-blackened circle the cruiser had burned from a jungle clearing.

The I-A sector chief pulled his head back in the port, stood in his customary slouch. It was a stance not improved by the sacklike patched blue fatigues he wore. Although on this operation he rated the flag of a division admiral, his fatigues carried no insignia. There was a generally unkempt, straggling look about him.

Orne stood at an opposite port, studying the jungle horizon. Something glittered out there too far away to identify, probably the city. Now and then he glanced at the bridge control console, at the chronometer above it, at the big translite map of their position which had been tilted from the upper bulkhead. He felt vaguely uneasy, intensely aware of his heavy-planet muscles overreacting on Gienah III with its gravity only seven-eighths Terran Standard. The surgical scars on his neck where the microcommunications equipment had been inserted into his flesh itched maddeningly. He scratched.

“Ha!” Stetson barked. “Politicians!”

A thin black insect with shell-like wings flew in Orne’s port, settled in his closely cropped red hair. Orne pulled the insect gently from his hair, released it. Again, it tried to land in his hair. He dodged. The insect flew across the bridge and out the port beside Stetson.

The starchy newness of Orne’s blue I-A fatigues failed to conceal his no-fat appearance. It gave Orne a look of military spit and polish, but something about his blocky, off-center features suggested the clown.

“I’m getting tired of waiting,” Orne said.

“You’re tired! Ha!”

“You hear anything new from Hamal?” Orne asked.

“Forget Hamal! Concentrate on Gienah!”

“I was just curious, trying to pass the time.”

A breeze rippled the tops of the green ocean below them. Here and there, red and purple flowers jutted from the verdure, bending and nodding like an attentive audience. The rich odor of rotting and growing vegetation came in the open ports.

“Just look at that blasted jungle!” Stetson said. “Them and their stupid orders!”

Orne listened quietly to the sounds of anger from his chief. Gienah obviously was a very special, very dangerous problem. Orne’s thoughts, though, kept going back to Hamal. The O-force had taken over on that planet and things were in their expected mess. No way had ever been found to keep occupying troops from betraying an overbearing attitude and engaging in certain oppressive activities—such as picking off all the prettiest and most willing women. When the O-force finally lifted from Hamal, the people of that planet might be peaceful, but they’d bear scars which five hundred generations might not erase.

A call bell tinkled on the bridge console above Orne. The red light at the speaker grid began blinking. Stetson shot an angry glance at the offending equipment. “Yeah, Hal?”

“Okay, Stet. Orders just came through. We use Plan C. ComGo says you may now brief the fieldman on the classified information, then jet the aitch out of here.”

“Did you ask them about using another fieldman?”

Orne looked up attentively. Secrecy piled upon secrecy and now this? “Negative. It’s crash priority. ComGo expects to blast the planet anyway.”

Stetson glared at the speaker grid. “Those fat-headed, lard-bottomed, pig-brained, schlemmel-hearted POLITICIANS!” He took two deep breaths. “Okay. Tell them we’ll comply.”

“Confirmation’s on the way. You want me to come up and help in the briefing?”

“No. I… Dammit! Ask them again if I can take this one!”

“Stet, they said we have to use Orne because of the records on the Delphinus.”

Stetson sighed, then: “Will they give us more time to brief him?”

“Crash priority, Stet. We’re wasting time.”

“If it isn’t one…”

“Stet!”

“What now?”

“I just got a confirmed contact.”

Stetson brought himself upright, poised on the balls of his feet. “Where?”

Orne glanced out the port, returned his attention to Stetson. The electric feeling of urgency and reluctance in the bridge made his stomach churn.

“Contact… about ten klicks out,” the speaker rasped.

“How many?”

“A mob. You want I should count them?”

“No. What’re they doing?”

“Making a beeline for us. You’d better move it.”

“Right. Keep us posted.”

“Wilco.”

Stetson looked across at his untried junior fieldman. “Orne, if you decide you want out of this assignment, you just say the word. I’ll back you to the limit.”

“Why should I want out of my first assignment?”

“Listen, and find out.” Stetson crossed to a tilt-locker beside the big translite map, hauled out a white coverall uniform with gold insignia, tossed it to Orne. “Get into these while I brief you.”

“But this is an R&R uni—”

“Get that damn uniform on your ugly frame!”

“Yes, sir, Admiral Stetson, sir. Right away, sir. But I thought I was through with old Rediscovery & Reeducation when you drafted me into the I-A.” He began changing from the I-A blue into the R&R white. Almost as an afterthought, he said: “…sir.”

A wolfish grin cracked Stetson’s big features. “You know, Orne, one of the reasons I drafted you was your proper attitude of subservience toward authority.”

Orne sealed the long seam of the coverall uniform. “Oh, yes, sir… sir.”

“All right, knock it off and pay attention.” Stetson gestured at the translite map with its green superimposed grid. “Here we are.” He put a finger on the map. “Here’s that city we flew over on our way down.” The finger moved. “You’ll head for the city as soon as we drop you. The city’s big enough that if you hold a course roughly northeast you can’t miss it. We’re…”

Again the call bell rang, the light flashed.

“What is it this time, Hal?” Stetson barked.

“They’ve changed to Plan H, Stet. New orders cut.”

“Five days?”

“That’s all they can give us.”

“Holy…”

“ComGo says we can’t keep the information out of High Commissioner Bullone’s hands any longer than that.”

“It’s five days then.” Stetson sighed.

Orne moved closer to the map, asked: “Is it the usual R&R foul-up?”

Stetson grimaced. “Worse, thanks to Bullone and company. We’re just one jump ahead of another catastrophe, but they still pump the Rah & Rah into the boys back at dear old Uni-Galacta.”

“It’s either go out and rediscover the lost planets or let them rediscover us,” Orne said. “I prefer the former.”

“Yeah, and we’re going to rediscover one too many someday, but this Gienah is a different breed of fish. It’s not, repeat not, a rediscovery.”

Orne felt his muscles stiffen. “Alien?”

“A-L-I-E-N,” Stetson spelled it out. “A species and a culture we’ve never before contacted. That language you were force-fed on the way out here, that’s an alien language. It’s not complete, but all we have off the minis. And we didn’t give you the basic data, what little we have, on the natives, because we’ve been hoping to scrub this place and nobody the wiser.”

“Holy mazoo! Why?”

“Twenty-six days ago an I-A sector searcher came on this planet, made a routine mini-sneaker survey. When he combed in his net of sneakers to check their data, lo and behold he had a little stranger.”

“One of theirs?”

“No, one of ours. It was a mini off the Delphinus. Rediscovery. The Delphinus has been unreported for eighteen standard months. Cause of disappearance unknown.”

“You think it cracked up here?”

“We don’t know. If it did crash on Gienah, we haven’t been able to spot it. And we’ve looked, son. Believe me, we’ve looked. And now we’ve something else on our minds. It’s the one, little item that makes me want to blot Gienah and run home with my tail between my legs. We’ve a…” Again the call bell chimed.

“NOW WHAT?” Stetson roared.

“I’ve sneaked a mini over that mob, Stet. They’re talking about us, near as I can make out. It looks like a definite raiding party and armed.”

“What armament?”

“Too gloomy down there to be absolutely certain. The infra beam’s not working on this mini. They look like hard pellet rifles of some kind, though. Might even be off the Delphinus.”

“Can you get closer to make sure?”

“No sense risking it without the infra. Light’s very poor down there. They’re moving up fast, though.”

“Keep an eye on them, but don’t ignore the other sectors,” Stetson said.

“You think I was born yesterday?” The voice from the speaker was an angry rasping. The sound bapped off with a curt abruptness.

“One thing I like about the I-A,” Stetson said. “It collects such even-tempered types.” He stared gloomily at the white uniform on Orne, wiped a hand across his mouth as though he’d tasted something dirty.

“Why am I wearing this thing?” Orne asked.

“Disguise.”

“But where’s the mustache to go with it?”

Stetson smiled without humor. “I-A is developing its own answer to these fatkeistered politicians. We’re setting up our own search system; find the planets before they do. We’ve managed to put spies in key places at R&R. Any touchy planets our spies report, we divert the files.”

“Oh.”

“Then we look into said planets with bright boys such as yourself… disguised as R&R.”

“Goody. And what happens if R&R stumbles onto me while I’m down there playing patty-cake with the aliens?”

“We disown you.”

“Nuts! The never… Hey! You said an I-A ship found this place.”

“It did. Then one of our spies in R&R intercepted a routine request for an agent instructor to be assigned here with full equipment. Request signed by a First-Contact officer name of Riso… off the Delphinus!”

“But the…”

“Yeah, missing. The routine request was a forgery. And now you see why I’m for rubbing this place. Who’d dare forge such a request unless we knew for sure the original F-C officer was missing… or dead?”

“Stet, what the jumped-up mazoo are we doing here?” Orne demanded. “Alien contact calls for a full team of experts with all the…”

“This one calls for one planet-buster bomb, buster. In five days. Unless you give them a white bill in the meantime. High Commissioner Bullone will have word of this planet by then. If Gienah still exists in five days, can you imagine the fun the politicians’ll have with it? Oh, Mamma! Orne, we want this planet cleared for contact or dead before then.”

“We’re allowing ourselves to be stampeded,” Orne said. “I don’t like this. Look at what happened on…”

“YOU don’t like it!”

“There has to be another way, Stet. When we teamed up with the Alerinoids we gained five hundred years in the physical sciences alone, not to mention the…”

“The Alerinoids didn’t knock over one of our survey ships.”

“But what if the Delphinus crashed here? That’s a big jungle. If the locals just stumbled onto…”

“That’s what you’re going to find out, Orne. I hope. You’re going to be the answer to their routine request, an R&R agent-instructor. But answer me this, Mister R&R, how long before a tool-using species could be a threat to the Galaxy—given the information that’s in your head?”

“You saw that city, the size of it. They could be dug in within six months and there’d be no…”

“Yeah.”

Orne shook his head. “But think of it: two civilizations that matured along different lines. Think of all the different ways we’d approach similar problems, the lever that’d give us for…”

“You sound like a Uni-Galacta lecture. Are you through marching arm and arm into the misty future?”

Orne took a deep breath. He felt that he was being pushed too fast to make rational decisions. He asked: “Why me? You’re tossing me into this. Why?”

“The Delphinus master lists. You’d still be on ’em as an R&R fieldman, full identification, eye pattern, everything. That’s important if you’re masquerading as…”

“Am I the only one you have? I’m a recent convert to I-A, but…”

“You want out?”

“I didn’t say that. I just want to know why I’m…”

“Because the bigdomes at HQ fed a set of requirements into one of their mechanical monsters. Your name popped out. They were looking for somebody capable, dependable… and expendable.”

“Hey!”

“That’s why I’m down here briefing you instead of sitting back on a flagship. I got you into the I-A. Now, you listen carefully: If you push the panic button here without cause I will personally flay you. We both know the advantages of an alien contact. But if you get into a really hot spot and call for help, I’ll dive this cruiser into that city to get you out. Clear?”

Orne tried to swallow in a dry throat. “Yes. And thanks, Stet, but if…”

“We’ll take up a tight orbit. Out beyond us will be five transports full of I-A marines plus a Class IX Monitor with one planet-buster. You’re calling the shots, God help you! First, we have to know if they’ve taken the Delphinus, and if so, where it is. Next, we want to know how warlike these goons are. Can we deal with them? Are they too bloodthirsty? What’s their potential?”

“In five days?”

“Not a second more.”

“What do we know about them?”

“Not much. They look something like an ancient Terran chimpanzee, but with blue fur. Face is hairless, pink-skinned.” Stetson touched a button at his waist. The translite map above him became a screen with a figure frozen on it. “This is life size.”

“Looks like the famous missing link,” Orne said.

“Yeah, but you’ve a different kind of link to find.”

“Vertical slit pupil in their eyes,” Orne said. He studied the figure intently. The Gienahn had been recorded from the front by a mini-sneaker. The figure stood about a meter and a half tall. The stance was slightly bent forward, long arms hanging. The nose was flat with two vertical slits. The mouth was a lipless gash above a receding chin. Four fingers on the hands. It wore a wide belt from which dangled neat pouches and what appeared to be tools, although their use was obscure. Perhaps they were weapons. There appeared to be the tip of a tail protruding from behind one of the squat legs. The creature stood on lawn like greenery and behind it towered the faery spires of the city they observed from the air.

“Tails?” Orne asked.

“Right. They’re arboreal. Not a road on the whole planet that we can find. Lots of vine lanes through the jungle, though.” Stetson’s face hardened. “Match that with a city as advanced as the one there.”

“Slave culture?”

“Probably.”

“How many cities do they have?”

“We’ve found two. This one and another on the far side. The other one’s a ruin.”

“War?”

“You tell us. Lots of mysteries here.”

“How extensive is the jungle cover?”

“Almost complete on the land surfaces. There are polar oceans, a few lakes and rivers. One low mountain chain follows the equatorial belt about two-thirds of the way around the planet. Continental drift scars are old. The surface has been stabilized for a long time.”

“And only two cities. Are you sure of that?”

“Reasonably. It’d be pretty hard to miss something the size of that place.” He pointed to the city behind the figure on the screen. “It must be two hundred kilometers long, at least fifty wide. It’s swarming with these creatures. We’ve a good zone-count estimate; it places this city’s population at more than thirty million. In population, it’s the biggest single city we’ve ever heard of.”

“Whee-ew,” Orne breathed. “Look at the size of those buildings. What these Gienahns could tell us about urban living.”

“And we may never hear what they have to say, Orne. Unless you bring them into the fold, there’ll be nothing but ashes for our archaeologists to pick over.”

“There has to be some other way!”

“I agree, but…”

The call bell jingled.

Stetson’s voice sounded tired: “Yeah, Hal?”

“That mob’s only about five klicks out, Stet. Orne’s gear is outside in the disguised air sled.”

“We’ll be right down.”

“Why a disguised sled?” Orne asked.

“Hal’s idea. If the Gienahns think it’s a ground buggy, they may get careless when you most need an advantage. We could always scoop you out of the air, you know.”

“Stet, what’re my chances?”

“Slim. Maybe less than that. These goons probably captured the Delphinus. Our best guess is they want you just long enough to get your equipment and everything you know.”

“Only five days.”

“If you’re not out by then, we blast.”

“Expendable.”

“You want to turn down this mission?”

“No.”

“Didn’t expect you to. Look, use the back-door rule, son. Always leave yourself a way out.”

“The way you’re doing,” Orne said.

Stetson stared at him for several heartbeats, then: “Yeah. Let’s check that equipment the surgeons put in your neck.”

“I was wondering about that.”

Stetson put a hand to his own throat. His mouth remained closed, but a surf-hissing voice became audible to Orne, radiating from the implanted transceiver: “You read me, Orne?”

“I read you. Is this…”

“No!” the voice hissed. “Touch the mike contact. Keep your mouth closed. Just use your speaking muscles without speaking aloud.”

Orne obeyed, hand to throat. “How’s this?”

“That’s better,” Stetson said. “You come in loud and clear.”

“How far will this transmit?”

“There’ll be a relay sneaker close to you at all times,” Stetson said. “Now, when you’re not touching the mike contact, this rig will still feed us everything you say and everything that goes on around you. We’ll monitor everything. Got that?”

“I hope so.”

Stetson held out his right hand. “Good luck, Orne. I meant that about diving in for you. Just say the word.”

“I know the word,” Orne said. “It’s HELP!”