The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Definitely wood sorrel: Oxalis acetosella. How clever of it to grow up here.’ His thoughts held a pious tinge; they always did; it was for that he bore the name Preacher.

Only afterwards did they notice the spaceship. It was very tall and sturdy and took up a lot of ground that might more profitably have been used by the flowers. It was also very heavy, and during the time it had stood there its stem had sunk into the thawing earth.

‘A nice design,’ Woebee commented, circling it. ‘What do you think it is?’

High above their heads it towered. On the highest point sat a loon, preening itself in the sun and uttering occasionally its cry, the cry of emptiness articulate. Around the shadowed side of the ship, a shriveled heap of snow rested comfortably against the metal. The metal was wonderfully smooth, but dark and unshining.

‘However bulky it is down here, it manages to turn into a spire at the top,’ the Preacher said, squinting into the sun.

‘But what is it?’ Woebee repeated; then he began to sing, to show that he did not mind being unaware of what it was.

‘It was made,’ Aprit said cautiously. This was not like dealing with wood sorrel; they had never thought about spaceships before.

‘You can get into it here,’ Little Light said, pointing. He rarely spoke, and when he did he generally pointed as well.

They climbed into the airlock, all except Calurmo, who still stooped over the wood sorrel. Its fragrant pseudo-consciousness trembled with happiness in the fresh warmth of the sun. Calurmo made a slight churring noise, persistent and encouraging, and after a minute the tiny plant broke loose of the soil and crawled onto his hand.

He brought it up to his great eyes and let his thoughts slide gently in through the roots. Slowly they radiated up a stalk and into one of the yellow-green trefoils, probing, exploring the sappy being of the leaf. Calurmo brought pressure to bear. Reluctantly, then with excitement, the plant yielded, and among its pink-streaked blossoms formed another, with five sepals, five petals, ten stamens and five stigmas, identical with the ones the plant had grown unaided.

The taste of oxalic acid still pleasant in his thoughts, Calurmo sat back and smiled. To create a freak – that was nothing; but to create something just like the originals – how the others would be pleased!

‘Calurmo!’ It was Aprit, conspiratorial, almost guilty. ‘Come and see what we’ve found.’

Knowing it would not be as delightful as the sorrel, nevertheless Calurmo jumped up, eager to share an interest. He climbed into the airlock and followed Aprit through the ship, carrying his flower carefully.

The others were drifting interestedly around the control room, high in the nose.

‘Come and look at the valley!’ invited Little Light, pointing out at the spread of bright land which shone all around them. From here, too, they could see a wide river, briefly shorn of ice and sparkling full of spawning fish.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Calurmo said simply.

‘We have indeed discovered a strange object,’ remarked the Preacher, stroking a great upholstered seat. ‘How old do you think it all is? It has the feel of great age.’

‘I can tell you how long it has stood here,’ said Woebee. ‘The door through which we entered was open for the snow to drift in. When the snow melts it can never run away. I scanned it, and the earliest drops of it fell from the sky twelve thousand seasons ago.’

‘What? Three thousand years?’ exclaimed Aprit.

‘No. Four thousand years – you know I don’t count winter as a season.’

A line of geese broke V-formation to avoid the nose of the ship, and joined faultlessly again on the other side. Aprit caught their military thoughts as they sailed by.

‘We should have come up this way more often,’ said Calurmo regretfully, gazing at his sorrel. The tiny flowers were so very beautiful.

The next thing to decide was what they had discovered. Accordingly, they walked slowly around the control room, registering in unison, blithely unaware of the upper-level reasoning that lay behind their almost instinctive act. It took them five minutes, five minutes after starting completely from scratch; for the ship represented a fragment of a technology absolutely unknown to them. Also, it was a deep-spacer, which meant a corresponding complexity in drive, accommodation and equipment; but the particular pattern of its controls – repeated only in a few ships of its own class – designated unfailingly the functions and intentions of the vessel. At least, it did to Calurmo and party, as easily as one may distinguish certain features of a hand from finding a lost glove.

Little surprise was wasted on the concept of a spaceship. As Aprit remarked, they had their own less cumbrous methods of covering interplanetary distances. But several other inferences fascinated them.

‘Light is the fastest thing in our universe and the slowest in the dimension through which this ship travels,’ said Woebee. ‘It was made by a clever race.’

‘It was made by a race incapable of carrying power in their own bodies,’ said Little Light.

‘Nor could they orient very efficiently,’ the Preacher added, indicating the astro-navigational equipment.

‘So there are planets attending other stars,’ said Calurmo thoughtfully, his mind probing the possibilities.

‘And sensible creatures on those planets,’ said Aprit.

‘Not sensible creatures,’ said Little Light, pointing to the gunnery cockpit with its banks of switches. ‘Those are to control destruction.’

‘All creatures have some sense,’ said the Preacher.

They switched on. The old ship seemed to creak and shudder, as if it had experienced too much time and snow ever to move again.

‘It was content enough without stars,’ muttered Woebee.

‘Rain water must have got into the hydrogen,’ Aprit said.

‘It’s a very funny machine indeed to have made,’ said the Preacher sternly. ‘I don’t wonder someone went away and left it.’

The boredom of manual control was not for them; they triggered the necessary impulses directly to the motors. Below them, the splendid plain tilted and shrunk to a green penny set between the white and blue of land and sea. The edge of the ocean curved and with a breath-catching distortion became merely a segment of a great ball dwindling far beneath. The further they got, the brighter it shone.

‘Most noble view,’ commented the Preacher.

Aprit was not looking. He had climbed into the computer and was feeding one of his senses along the relays and circuits of the memory bank and inference sector. He clucked happily as data drained to him. When he had it all he spat it back and returned to the others.

‘Very ingenious,’ he said, explaining it. ‘But built by a race of behaviourists. Their souls were obviously trapped by their actions, consequently their science was trapped by their beliefs; they did not know where to look for real progress.’

‘It’s very noisy, isn’t it?’ remarked the Preacher, as if producing a point that confirmed what had just been said.

‘That noise should not be,’ said Calurmo coolly. ‘It is an alarm bell, and indicates something is wrong.’

The sound played about them unceasingly until Aprit cut it off.

‘I expect we are doing something wrong,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll go and see what it is. But why make the bell ring here, and not where the trouble is?’

As Aprit left the control room, Little Light pointed into the huge celestial globe in which the stars of the galaxy were embalmed like diamonds in amber. ‘Let’s go there,’ he suggested, rattling the calibrations until a tangential course lit up between Earth and a cluster of worlds in the center of the galaxy. ‘I’m sure it will be lovely there. I wonder if sorrel will grow in those parts; it won’t grow on Venus, you know.’

While he spoke he spun the course integrator dial, read off the specifications of flight, and fed the co-ordinates as efficiently into the computer as if he had just undergone a training course.

Aprit returned smiling.

‘I’ve fixed it,’ he said. ‘Silly of us. We left the door open when we came in – there wasn’t any air in here. That was why the bell was ringing.’

They were picked up on Second Empire screens about two parsecs from the outpost system of Kyla. An alert-beetle pinpointed them and flashed their description simultaneously to Main Base on Kyla I and half a dozen other interested points – a term including the needle fleet hovering two light-years out from Kyla system.

Main Base to GOC Pointer, Needle Fleet 305A: Unidentified craft, mass 40,000 tons, proceeding outskirts system toward galaxy centre. Estimated speed, 20 SLU. Will you intercept?

GOC Pointer to Main Base, Kyla I: Am already on job.

Main Base to GOC Pointer: Alien acknowledges no signals, despite calls on all systems.

Pointer to Main Base: Quiet type. Appears to be heading from region Omega Y76 W592. Is this correct?

Main Base to Pointer: Correct.

Pointer to Main Base: Earth?

Main Base to Pointer: Looks like it.

Pointer to Main Base: Standing by for trouble.

Main Base to Pointer: Could be enemy stratagem, of course.

Pointer to Main Base: Of course. Going in. Out.

Officer Commanding needleship Pointer was Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley. He was still a youngish man, the Everlasting War being very good for promotion, but nevertheless thirty-four years of vacuum-busting lay behind him, sapping at his humanity. He stood now, purple of face under 4Gs, peering into the forward screens and snapping at Deeping.

Confusedly, Deeping flicked through the hand-view, trying to ignore the uniform that towered over him. On the hand-view, ship after ship appeared, only to be rejected by the selector. Here was trouble; the approaching alien, slipping in from a quarantined sector of space, could not be identified. The auto-view did not recognise it, and now old records were being checked on the hand-view; they, too, seemed to be drawing a blank.

Sweating, the unhappy Deeping glanced again at the image of the alien. Definitely not human; equally definitely, not Boux – or was it an enemy ruse, as Base suggested? The Pointer was only half a parsec away from it now. They were within hitting distance, and the unidentified craft might hit first.

Fear, thought Deeping. My stomach is sick of the taste of fear; it knows all its nuances, from the numb terror of man’s ancient enemy, the Boux, to the abject dread of Rhys-Barley’s tongue. He flicked desperately. Suddenly the hand-view beeped.

The Grand-Admiral pounced, struck down the specificator bar and pulled out the emergent sheet. Even as he read it, a prolonged scrunching sound from the bowels of the ship announced that traction beams from Pointer and a sister ship had interlocked on the speeding alien. The gravities wavered for a moment under the extra load and then came back to normal.

‘By Vega!’ Rhys-Barley exclaimed, flourishing the flimsy under Captain Hardick’s nose. ‘What do you make of it? Tell Intake to go easy with our prize out there; they’ve got a bit of history on their hands. It’s a First Empire ship, built something like four thousand seven hundred years ago on Luna, the satellite of Earth. Windsor class, with a Spannell XII Light Drive. Ever hear of a Spannell Drive, Captain?’

‘Before my day, I’m afraid, sir.’

‘Deeping, get Communications to have Kyla I send us details of all ships of Windsor class, dates of obsolescence, etc. I think there’s something queer … Where’d it come from, I’d like to know.’

Interest made Rhys-Barley hop in front of the screens with less dignity than the Grand-Admiral usually mustered. Deeping relaxed enough to wink covertly at a friend on Bombardment Panel.

The alien was already visible through the ports as a gleaming chip a mile away, its terrific velocity killed by the traction beams. Now the tiny alert-beetle which had first discovered it headed toward the Pointer. The beetle gleamed pale red, scarcely visible against the regal profusion of Central stars. A beetle from the Pointer shot out to meet it, bearing a cable. The beetles connected and floated back across the narrowing void. They touched the Windsor-class ship and instantly it was surrounded by the pale amber glow of a force shield.

Everyone on the Pointer breathed more easily then. No energy whatsoever could break through that shield.

‘Haul her in,’ the Captain said.

Intake acknowledged the order and gradually the little ship was drawn closer.

Rhys-Barley cast an eye again at the encephalophone reading on the bulkhead panel. Reading still ‘Nil’. But the Nil wavered as if it was unsure of itself. Maybe they had caught a dead ship; thought waves should have registered before now, whether Boux or human.

Tension heightened again as the alien was drawn aboard. Matching velocities was a tricky business, and the manoeuvre always entailed a great deal of noise audible throughout the ship. A pity that super-science had never come up with a competent sound-absorber, Rhys-Barley thought morosely. The deck under him swayed a little.

Deeping handed him a slip from Kyla records. There had been four ships of the Windsor class. Three had gone to the scrap yards over three thousand years ago. The fourth had been abandoned for lack of fuel during the great Boux invasion waves that had resulted in the collapse of the First Empire. Its name: Regalia.

‘That must be our pigeon. Let’s get down to Interrogation Bay, Captain,’ Rhys-Barley suggested. Together the pair adjusted their arm-synchs and stepped into the teleport.

They reappeared instantly beside their captive. Aliens Officer was already there, enjoying a brief spell of glory, supervising the batteries of every type of recorder, scanner, probe and what-have-you the ship possessed in concealed positions about the Regalia. The latter looked like a small whale stranded in a large cave.

The Preacher came first out of the airlock because he always went ahead anywhere. Then followed Calurmo and Aprit, stopping to examine the crystalline formations clinging to the lock doors. After them came Woebee and Little Light. Together they gazed at the severe functionalism and grey metal that surrounded them.

‘This is not a pretty planet,’ the Preacher observed.

‘It is not the one Little Light chose,’ Woebee explained.

‘Don’t be silly, the pair of you,’ Calurmo said, a little sternly. ‘This is not a planet. It is made. Use your senses.’

‘Let’s speak to those beings over there,’ said Little Light, pointing. ‘The ones behind the invisibility screen.’ He wandered over to Rhys-Barley and tapped his rediffusion shield.

‘I can see you,’ he said. ‘Can you see me?’

‘All right, cut rediffusion,’ snarled Rhys-Barley. The crimson on his face was no longer produced by the forces of gravity.

‘No evidence of any energy or explosive weapons, sir,’ Aliens Officer reported. ‘Permission to interview?’

‘OK’

Aliens Officer wore a black uniform. His hair was white, his face was gray. He had a square jaw. The Preacher liked the look of him and approached.

‘Are you the captain of this ship?’ asked the Aliens Officer.

‘That question does not mean anything to me. I’m sorry,’ said the Preacher.

‘Who commands this ship, the Regalia?’

‘I don’t understand that one either. What do you think he means, Calurmo?’

Calurmo was scanning the immense room in which they stood. His attention flicked momentarily to the little brain glands in the ceiling, that computed the lung power present and co-ordinated the air supply accordingly. Then he explored all the minute currents and pulses that plied ceaselessly in the walls and floor, adjusting temperature and gravity, guarding against strain and metal fatigue; he swept the air itself, chemically pure and microbe-proof, rendered non-conductive. Nowhere did he find life, and for a moment he recalled the land they had left, with the fish spawning in its rivers and the walrus sporting in its seas.

He dismissed the vision and tried to answer the Preacher’s question.

‘If he means who made the ship go, we all did,’ he said. ‘Little Light did the direction, Woebee and I did the fuel – ’

‘I don’t like it in here, Calurmo,’ Aprit interrupted. ‘These beings smell of something odd …’

‘It’s fear,’ said Calurmo, happy to be interrupted by a friend. ‘Intellectual and physical fear. I’ll tell you about it later. They’ve got some sort of inertia barrier up and their emotions don’t come through, but their thoughts are clear enough.’

‘Too clear!’ said Woebee with a laugh. ‘They are afraid of anyone who does not look like themselves, and if anyone does look like them – they are suspicious! I say, let’s get back to the snows; that was a more interesting place to explore.’

He made a move toward the ship. Instantly an arrangement of duralum bars and R-rays descended from the roof and held them in five separate cells. They stood temporarily disconcerted in glowing cages.

The Aliens Officer walked among them grimly. ‘Now you’re going to answer questions,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we are forced to use these methods to secure your attention. The speech-pattern separators that allow us to talk together work through the floor here and are relayed out to me via Main Base. I don’t imagine you can do us much harm over such a system. And nothing can get through the electronic barricade we’ve brought up against you. In other words, you’re trapped. Now let’s have straight answers, please.’

‘Here’s a straight answer for your speech-pattern separator,’ said Aprit. Just for a second he wore a look of concentration. At once smoke rose from the floor of the bay. A dozen different alerts clicked and whirred, relentlessly bearing witness to ruined equipment.

Base signalled a two-day repair job required on language circuits.

‘Now we’ll use our system of communicating,’ Aprit said, mollified.

‘You shouldn’t be destructive,’ the Preacher reproved. ‘Havoc becomes a habit.’ Delighted with the chime of his maxim, he repeated it to himself.

Aliens Officer went a little paler. He recognised a show of force when he saw one. Also, he was still hearing them perfectly despite the smouldering failure of his speech-pattern separators. A subordinate hurried up and conferred with him for a moment. Then the officer looked up and said to the prisoners: ‘At that act of destruction you released typical Boux configurations of thought. Do you admit your origins?’

Pointing to the R-rays, Little Light said: ‘I am beginning to become uneasy, friends. This gadget surrounding us is as impervious as he claims.’

‘I think it would be very wise to withdraw,’ the Preacher agreed. ‘Shall we not have left the Arctic?’

‘That seems the only way,’ agreed Calurmo doubtfully. Redature always upset his stomach.

Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley pushed roughly forward. He was dissatisfied with the conduct of the interrogation. Also, he was worried. There was standard procedure for dealing with Boux; man’s deadly enemy, originating on fast-rotating planets with high-velocity winds, were fluid in form and could easily assume the shape of men. A Boux-man loose on a planet like Kyla I could do an infinite amount of damage – and Bouxmen were not easy to detect. Therefore, once Main Base was satisfied there were Boux aboard Pointer, they were quite likely to signal the flagship to proceed into the nearest sun. Rhys-Barley had other ideas about his future.

He halted pugnaciously before Aprit.

‘What’s your real shape?’ he demanded.

Aprit was puzzled. ‘You mean my metaphysical shape?’ he asked.

‘No, I do not. I mean that my instruments register close to the Boux end of the brain impulse-scale. And Boux can masquerade as anything they like, over limited periods of time. What I’m asking is, who or what are you?’

‘We are brothers,’ said Aprit mildly. ‘As you are our brother. Only you are a very bad-tempered brother.’

The stun was shot into Aprit’s enclosure from the still-smoking floor. It struck with frightening suddenness. Pressure built instantaneously to a peak that would have spread a man uniformly over the walls of the enclosure in a pink paste. It would have forced a genuine Boux into one of his primary shapes. Aprit merely dropped unconscious to the deck.

Little Light pointed crossly at the Grand-Admiral. ‘For that, the instant Aprit returns we shall not have left Arctic at all,’ he said.

‘It was a stupid and ignorant act,’ agreed the Preacher.

Nobody had noticed Deeping. When the Captain and the Admiral had come through the teleport, he had been left to take the long, physical route down to Interrogation Bay. One does not waste six million volts on junior ranks.

Now he walked straight up to Calurmo and said, peering anxiously through the vibrating wall that separated them: ‘I am very sorry we have not made you more welcome here, but we are at war.’

‘Please don’t apologise,’ said Calurmo. ‘It must be very upsetting for you to have a difference with someone. How long has this been happening?’

‘Thousands of years,’ said Deeping bitterly.

‘March that man to the disintegrators,’ Rhys-Barley bellowed. Two guards moved smartly toward Deeping.

‘If you will pardon my venturing to suggest it,’ Aliens Officer said, wobbling at the knees as he spoke, ‘but just possibly, sir, this new approach might … might be effective.’

Faint with his own temerity, he saw Rhys-Barley’s hand flicker and stay the guards.

‘ – a difference we can never settle until we vanquish the enemy,’ Deeping was saying. He was still pale, but stood stiff and resolute, almost as if he drew strength from these strange beings.

‘Oh yes, you can settle it,’ Calurmo said. ‘But you’ve been going about it the wrong way.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ Rhys-Barley chimed in. ‘You don’t know the problem – unless you are a race of Boux we have not met before.’

‘My friends are learning of the problem now,’ murmured Calurmo, glancing at Little Light and Woebee, who were unusually quiet. But the Grand-Admiral went ruthlessly on.

‘The enemy has inestimable advantages over Man. It has only been by exerting his military might up to the hilt, by standing continually on his toes, by having one finger perpetually on the trigger, that Man has kept the Boux out of his systems.’

‘That really is the truth,’ said Deeping earnestly. ‘If you have a super-weapon you could let us know about we would be very grateful.’

‘Don’t humour me, please,’ Calurmo said. He turned to Little Light and Woebee, who smiled and nodded. At the same time Aprit opened his eyes and stood up.

‘I had such a funny dream,’ he said. ‘Do we go home now?’

‘We want to readjust these people first,’ the Preacher said. The five of them conferred together for a minute, while Rhys-Barley walked rapidly up and down and Deeping sneezed once or twice; R-rays had that effect on his nose.

Finally Woebee motioned to Deeping and said: ‘You must forgive me if I say your people appear full of contradictions to us, but it is so. One contradiction, however, we could not understand. You pen us in here with impenetrable R-rays, as you term your inertia field, and also with duralum bars. The bars are quite superfluous unless – they are not what they seem; they are another of the machines you so delight in. They are, in fact, categorising grids that transmit almost comprehensive records of the five of us back to your nearest planet. An excellent device! Entire blueprints of us, psychologically and physiobiologically, are fed back to your biggest brain units. You really need complimenting on the efficiency of this machine. It is so good, in fact, that Little Light and I have explored Main Base by it, have sent the rest of your fleet packing, and have broadcast directions to your vice-captain or whatever you call him up in the controls; as a result of which, you are now travelling where we want you to go and this Interrogation Bay is cut off from the rest of the ship.’