Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (263 page)

“It’s headed for us at very high acceleration, sir. The odds are that they’re thinking the same thing, sir, that neither of us will dare let the other go home. Do you think they’ll try a contact with us, or let loose with their weapons as soon as they’re in range?”

The
Llanvabon
was no longer in a crevasse of emptiness in the nebula’s thin substance. She swam in luminescence. There were no stars save the two fierce glows in the nebula’s heart. There was nothing but an all-enveloping light, curiously like one’s imagining of underwater in the tropics of Earth.

The alien ship had made one sign of less than lethal intention. As it drew near the
Llanvabon
, it decelerated. The
Llanvabon
itself had advanced for a meeting and then come to a dead stop. Its movement had been a recognition of the nearness of the other ship. Its pausing was both a friendly sign and a precaution against attack. Relatively still, it could swivel on its own axis to present the least target to a slashing assault, and it would have a longer firing-time than if the two ships flashed past each other at their combined speeds.

The moment of actual approach, however, was tenseness itself. The
Llanvabon
’s needle-pointed bow aimed unwaveringly at the alien bulk. A relay to the captain’s room put a key under his hand which would fire the blasters with maximum power. Tommy Dort watched, his brow wrinkled. The aliens must be of a high degree of civilization if they had spaceships, and civilization does not develop without the development of foresight. These aliens must recognize all the implications of this first contact of two civilized races as fully as did the humans on the Llanvabon.

The possibility of an enormous spurt in the development of both, by peaceful contact and exchange of their separate technologies, would probably appeal to them as to man. But when dissimilar human cultures are in contact, one must usually be subordinate or there is war. But subordination between races arising on separate planets could not be peacefully arranged. Men, at least, would never consent to subordination, nor was it likely that any highly developed race would agree. The benefits to be derived from commerce could never make up for a condition of inferiority. Some races—men, perhaps—would prefer commerce to conquest. Perhaps—perhaps!—these aliens would also. But some types even of human beings would have craved for war. If the alien ship now approaching the
Llanvabon
returned to its home base with news of humanity’s existence and of ships like the
Llanvabon
, it would give its race the choice of trade or battle. They might want trade, or they might want war. But it takes two to make trade, and only one to make war. They could not be sure of men’s peacefulness, or could men be sure of theirs. The only safety for either civilization would lie in the destruction of one or both of the two ships here and now.

But even victory would not be really enough. Men would need to know where this alien race was to be found, for avoidance if not for battle. They would need to know its weapons, and its resources, and if it could be a menace and how it could be eliminated in case of need. The aliens would feel the same necessities concerning humanity.

So the skipper of the
Llanvabon
did not press the key which might possibly have blasted the other ship to nothingness. He dared not. But he dared not not fire either. Sweat came out on his face.

A speaker muttered. Someone from the range room.

“The other ship’s stopped, sir. Quite stationary. Blasters are centered on it, sir.”

It was an urging to fire. But the skipper shook his head to himself. The alien ship was no more than twenty miles away. It was dead-black. Every bit of its exterior was an abysmal, nonreflecting sable. No details could be seen except by minor variations in its outline against the misty nebula.

“It’s stopped dead, sir,” said another voice. “They’ve sent a modulated short wave at us, sir. Frequency modulated. Apparently a signal. Not enough power to do any harm.”

The skipper said though tight-locked teeth:

“They’re doing something now. There’s movement on the outside of their hull. Watch what comes out. Put the auxiliary blasters on it.”

Something small and round, came smoothly out of the oval outline of the black ship. The bulbous hulk moved.

“Moving away, sir,” said the speaker. “The object they let out is stationary in the place they’ve left.”

Another voice cut in:

“More frequency modulated stuff, sir. Unintelligible.”

Tommy Dort’s eyes brightened. The skipper watched the visiplate, with sweat-droplets on his forehead.

“Rather pretty, sir,” said Tommy, meditatively. “If they sent anything toward us, it might seem a projectile or a bomb. So they came close, let out a lifeboat, and went away again. They figure we can send a boat or a man to make contact without risking our ship. They must think pretty much as we do.”

The skipper said, without moving his eyes from the plate:

“Mr. Dort, would you care to go out and look the thing over? I can’t order you, but I need all my operating crew for emergencies. The observation staff—”

“Is expendable. Very well, sir,” said Tommy briskly. “I won’t take a lifeboat, sir. Just a suit with a drive in it. It’s smaller and the arms and legs will look unsuitable for a bomb. I think I should carry a scanner, sir.”

* * * *

The alien ship continued to retreat. Forty, eighty, four hundred miles. It came to a stop and hung there, waiting. Climbing into his atomic-driven spacesuit just within the
Llanvabon
’s air locks Tommy heard the reports as they went over the speakers throughout the ship. That the other ship had stopped its retreat at four hundred miles was encouraging. It. might not have weapons effective at a greater distance than that, and so felt safe. But just as the thought formed itself in his mind, the alien retreated precipitately still farther. Which, as Tommy reflected as he emerged from the lock, might be because the aliens had realized they were giving themselves away, or might be because they wanted to give the impression that they had done so.

He swooped away from the silvery-mirror
Llanvabon
, through a brightly glowing emptiness which was past any previous experience of the human race. Behind him, the
Llanvabon
swung about and darted away. The skipper’s voice came in Tommy’s helmet-phones.

“We’re pulling back, too, Mr. Dort. There is a bare possibility that they’ve some explosive atomic reaction they can’t use from their own ship, but which might be destructive even as far as this. We’ll draw back. Keep your scanner on the object.”

The reasoning was sound, if not very comforting. An explosive which would destroy anything within twenty miles was theoretically possible, but humans didn’t have it yet. It was decidedly safest for the
Llanvabon
to draw back.

But Tommy Dort felt very lonely. He sped through emptiness toward the tiny black speck which hung in incredible brightness. The
Llanvabon
vanished. Its polished hull would merge with the glowing mist at a relatively short distance, anyhow. The alien ship was not visible to the naked eye, either. Tommy swam in nothingness, four thousand light-years from home, toward a tiny black spot which was the only solid object to be seen in all of space.

It was a slightly distorted, sphere, not much over six feet in diameter. It bounced away when Tommy landed on it, feet first. There were small tentacles, or horns, which projected in every direction. They looked rather like the detonating horns of a submarine mine, but there was a glint of crystal at the tip-end of each.

“I’m here,” said Tommy into his helmet phone.

He caught hold of a horn and drew himself to the object. It was all metal, dead-black.- He could feel no texture through his space gloves, of course, but he went over and over it, trying to discover its purpose.

“Deadlock, sir,” he said presently. “Nothing to report that the scanner hasn’t shown you.”

Then, through his suit, he felt vibrations. They translated themselves as clankings. A section of the rounded hull of the object opened out. Two sections. He worked his way around to look in and see the first nonhuman civilized beings that any man had ever looked upon.

But what he saw was simply a flat plate on which thin red glows crawled here and there in seeming aimlessness. His helmet phones emitted a startled exclamation. The skipper’s voice:

“Very good, Mr. Dort. Fix your scanner to look into that plate. They dumped out a robot with an infra-red visiplate for communication. Not risking any personnel. Whatever we might do would damage only machinery. Maybe they expect us to bring it on board—and it may have a bomb charge that can be detonated when they’re ready to start for home. I’ll send a plate to face one of its scanners. You return to the ship.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tommy. “But which way is the ship, sir?”

There were no stars. The nebula obscured them with its light The only thing visible from the robot was the double star at the nebula’s center. Tommy was no longer oriented. He had but one reference point.

“Head straight away from the double star,” came the order in his helmet phone. “We’ll pick you up.”

He passed another lonely figure, a little later, headed for the alien sphere with a vision plate to set up. The two spaceships, each knowing that it dared not risk its own race by the slightest lack of caution, would communicate with each other through this small round robot. Their separate vision systems would enable them to exchange all the information they dared give, while they debated the most practical way of making sure that their own civilization would not be endangered by this first contact with another. The truly most practical method would be the destruction of the other ship in a swift and deadly attack—in self-defense.

II

The Llanvabon, thereafter, was a ship in which there were two separate enterprises on hand at the same time. She had come out from Earth to make close-range observations on the smaller component of the double star at the nebula’s center. The nebula itself was the result of the most titanic explosion of which men have, any knowledge. The explosion took place some time in the year 2946 B.C., before the first of the seven cities of long-dead Ilium was even thought of. The light of that explosion reached Earth in the year 1054 A.D., and was duly recorded in ecclesiastical annals and somewhat more reliably by Chinese court astronomers. It was bright enough to be seen in daylight for twenty-three successive days. Its light—and it was four thousand light-years away—was brighter than that of Venus.

From these facts, astronomers could calculate nine hundred years later the violence of the detonation. Matter blown away from the center of the explosion would have traveled outward at the rate of two million, three hundred thousand miles an hour; more than thirty-eight thousand miles a minute; something over six hundred thirty-eight miles per second. When twentieth-century telescopes were turned upon the scene of this vast explosion, only a double star remained—and the nebula. The brighter star of the doublet was almost unique in having so high a surface temperature that it showed no spectrum lines at all. It had a continuous spectrum. Sol’s surface temperature is about 7,000° Absolute. That of the hot white star is 500,000 degrees. It has nearly the mass of the sun, but only one fifth its diameter, so that its density is one hundred seventy-three times that of water, sixteen times that of lead, and eight times that of iridium—the heaviest substance known on Earth. But even this density is not that of a dwarf white star like the companion of Sirius. The white star in the Crab Nebula is an incomplete dwarf; it is a star still in the act of collapsing. Examination—including the survey of a four-thousand-year column of its light—was worthwhile. The Llanvabon had come to make that examination. But the finding of an alien spaceship upon a similar errand had implications which overshadowed the original purpose of the expedition.

A tiny bulbous robot floated in the tenuous nebular gas. The normal operating crew of the
Llanvabon
stood at their posts with a sharp alertness which was productive of tense nerves. The observation staff divided itself, and a part went half-heartedly about the making of the observations for which the
Llanvabon
had come. The other half applied itself to the problem the spaceship offered.

It represented a culture which was up to space travel on an interstellar scale. The explosion of a mere five thousand years since must have blasted every trace of life out of existence in the area now filled by the nebula. So the aliens of the black spaceship came from another solar system. Their trip must have been, like that of the Earth ship, for purely scientific purposes. There was nothing to be extracted from the nebula.

They were, then, at least near the level of human civilization, which meant that they had or could develop arts and articles of commerce which men would want to trade for, in friendship. But they would necessarily realize that the existence and civilization of humanity was a potential menace to their own race. The two races could be friends, but also they could be deadly enemies. Each, even if unwillingly, was a monstrous menace to the other. And the only safe-thing to do with a menace is to destroy it.