The World Swappers (6 page)

CHAPTER XI

The course was a true geodesic of the continuum–a straight line in the sense of being the actual shortest distance between two points–and that was suspicious in itself. For it implied the ship’s crew knew what they were going to find.

Usually, a long voyage of exploration took the form of a series of dog-legs, from system to system; this one had bypassed half a dozen ostensibly promising stars, arrowing direct for Ymir’s own sun.

The Others knew something.

Because of the lapse of time involved in the propagation of the betraying “wake” of a hyperphotonic vessel, the watchers on Regis did not know what was happening until the alien craft had already been to Ymir. It had spent a few days in the neighborhood–by a convenient miracle, at a time when no human-built space-ships were scheduled to call. It was a bare outside chance, then, that the Others might have the impression they had chanced across an indigenous life-form, rather than a colony planted from elsewhere. If they had observed reasonably closely during their brief stay, however, the chance would have diminished to vanishing point. It was not worth banking on.

Like it or not, they had to recognize that the human race’s one advantage over the Others–that they knew of their competitors’ existence–had been canceled out.

The news was broached by Katya Ivanovna, on duty in the ever-watchful detector room, where by turns every individual on Regis calculated, identified, and plotted the course of ships in space, both human and alien. Katya was that much faster than most of the group at reducing the pattern of the vibrations in the cosmos to a line on a three-dimensional graph. This time, she wasted the small advantage in checking her calculations for error, hoping against hope she might be wrong.

But the figures she gave to Wu left no room for doubt.

For a long time the director of the expedition sat silent at his desk, contemplating the neat handwritten symbols before him. At length he pushed his chair back and stood up.

“Well, we’re on the downgrade now,” he said. “So far as I can see at the moment, there’s not a thing we can do. But we’ll scrape the barrel for ideas just in case. Pass this news to
everybody.
Tell them to drop what they’re doing and come here at once. Maybe someone will think of something.”

“And if they don’t?” Katya sounded as though she knew the answer to that; Wu gave it to her regardless.

“Then I guess we just have to blow them to bits.”

He crossed the room to the master public-address panel and leaned his thumb heavily on the activating switch.

“Drop what you’re doing, everybody, and come out into the plaza. The Others appear to have discovered Ymir. Somehow we’ve got to figure out a way of getting around this.”

It was a dispirited group that assembled on the hard-beaten sand of the plaza. Regis Main Base consisted of a haphazard arrangement of huts surrounding the heavy-duty transfax which was capable of handling practically any mass or size that might conceivably be required. They had chosen this spot for their base because it never rained, very seldom clouded over to interfere with local visual observation. The choice had drawbacks; one was that the heat was usually scorching around noon. People sweated and blinked their eyes as they waited for Wu to climb on the transfax platform and address them.

Miserably, Anty Dreean watched the director’s compact figure rise to the impromptu dais, straighten, and look around. What the hell
could
be done? They might as well throw their hands in and go home–if they had any homes to go to. Once you accepted the responsibility of the knowledge the group guarded, though, the group became your family. It had to. The risks were too great otherwise.

Now Wu picked up a hand amplifier and started to speak.

“We’ve detected the wake of an alien ship,” he said baldly. “It apparently went straight from one of the Others’ local bases to the Ymiran system. It spent a short time in scouting around. Now it’s heading directly back the way it came. There’s no room for doubt that we’ve been discovered; from what we know of the Others’ preferences in regard to climate and atmosphere, they will automatically have decided we represent a serious rival to their ambitions. Ymir has always been a major threat in two respects: first, it is the nearest of the human-inhabited worlds, except for Regis, to the Others’ sphere of activity; second, it is the only human-inhabited world which the Others could comfortably occupy.

“So far, presumably, none of the aliens except those actually aboard the scouting vessel are aware of our existence. I’ve seen figures on the ship’s course. It is now about one day out from Ymir, and six to seven days from its home base. It will pass closest to Regis about two and a quarter days from now. We could transfax a bomb over such a distance and destroy it and the knowledge it carries.

“Only the fact that it went straight from its base to Ymir suggests that the Others deduced the existence of a planet suitable for their race in that system. If their ship simply disappears without trace, they will send another; if they lose that too, they are probably sufficiently like ourselves in their patterns of thought to suspect deliberate interference. This problem presents the toughest enigma I can recall. We have less than two days in which to solve it some other way than by destroying the ship. Have you any suggestions?”

He looked around the gathering. He saw only down-cast eyes, blank, worried expressions. The gloom was tangible, almost; everyone reflected that the aims they had given their lives to now stood in immediate danger of annihilation.

Anty Dreean felt perhaps the most miserable of all. He had not yet managed to grow accustomed to seeing his cherished intentions founder on a rock of hard fact. Like everyone else engaged in the vast plan–the plan to ensure that man and alien should profit and not suffer from their impending contact–he had given up everything to this single end. Failure was not simple failure; it was ultimate disaster.

Wu was speaking again. “We don’t have to have a complete solution. A stopgap, first. You know that we are in sight of success if only we can have enough time. Saïd Counce is achieving wonders with his attempts to influence Bassett; Jaroslav Dubin is laying the foundation for implementing our plans on Ymir. If we can stave off contact for a few years more, we shall be able to risk cutting corners. At the moment, we daren’t. Unless someone can suggest a means of gaining time, we shall be forced to sacrifice our entire hopes.”

To his own complete astonishment, Anty Dreean found that he had an idea. He looked covertly round at his neighbors; their faces were as blank as before. He looked beyond, feeling afraid to speak out at once in case someone forestalled him with a better plan. No one spoke, and Wu shrugged and started to get down from the platform.

“Dr. Wu!” said Anty. “Just a moment, please.”

Wu paused and looked round. “Yes, Anty?” he said. He didn’t sound hopeful.

“We don’t have to destroy the ship, you know,” Anty ventured, and people everywhere in the plaza turned and looked at him. Self-consciously, he plunged ahead.

“We could kidnap it, couldn’t we? And fake it to look as if the crew caught some dangerous disease on this planet they visited? After all, the people at their base don’t know they didn’t actually land on Ymir.”

Wu gave a slow, thoughtful nod. “Anty, it just might be done. Someone give me a breakdown on power requirements.”

“Fantastic!” snapped an anonymous voice from near the transfax platform. “You mean reach out across–what is it, eight parsecs?–and grab a large ship in full flight, and haul it clear back to Regis? It’d take ten to the tenth ergs per gram, or something like that. Ridiculous!”

“Not at all,” contradicted someone else. “What we do is help ourselves to a hundred cubic yards of raw plasma out of the local sun, bottle it in a force field, and use that as a power source.”

“Is that practical?” Wu glanced at the speaker.

“No. But it could be done if we had to do it,” the man answered cynically.

Ideas bubbled up now like a hot spring through broken rocks; arguments started at a dozen points in the plaza as to the feasibility of the idea. Slide rules and calculators were already being applied to the mathematical questions involved.

“Dr. Wu,” someone called out. “What exactly do we do with the ship once we’ve got it?” That same question must have been in a hundred minds, for there was a chorus of agreement.

“Anty?” said Wu, looking down. “Could you enlarge on that point?”

“I was thinking we could bring the ship down near the pole, where the Others landed before. Then we could get the crew out and make non-living duplicates of them, and fill them full of some mutated culture of a native Ymiran microorganism.”

“Could we do it in time?” objected yet another voice, and a chorus from a group of biochemists assured him they would do their damnedest.

“That’s all very fine and large! That means we have to put the ship right back on its original course afterwards, with its dummy crew of corpses,” the same voice snapped; and the technicians who had furiously been calculating power requirements immediately doubled their original estimates and frowned over the result.

“All right! All right!” Wu shouted into his hand amplifier; silence fell like tropical night. “We’ll have to look into this in detail. Break it up and get on with it. The moment the ship comes within range, we want to seize it and ’fax it here to Regis. We have to deal with the crew before the ship theoretically gets out of range again, so that we can put it back where it would have got to if we hadn’t interfered. You’ve got one hour to tell me whether or not it can be done!”

The group dispersed quickly, leaving Anty Dreean standing rather foolishly by himself twenty paces from the transfax platform. Wu set down his hand amplifier and looked the young man up and down.

“Thank you, Anty,” he said in a voice that barely carried across the gap. “I think you’ve solved it.”

Anty tried to appear modest. He felt completely overwhelmed.

“If it can be made to work,” Wu continued, “you realize what it means, don’t you?”

“A breathing space,” said Anty, puzzled.

“I mean for yourself.” Wu was measuring his words. “It means that we shall really have to start taking notice of you, Anty. It looks to me as though you’ve got what Saïd Counce has–the talent we need most desperately. The ability to stand a problem on its head, so that it loses its difficulty. It isn’t a conscious talent. It’s just a gift. I thought it would be better to warn you. Because if you
have
got it, your life is going to be hell from here on out, with people pestering you night and day to give them the answers they can’t get themselves. You’d better have a talk with Saïd, young man, and let him warn you himself.”

He got down from the platform and walked across to where Anty stood. “You’ll get the dirtiest jobs of all, Anty. I can only hope you’ll enjoy it.”

The director’s seriousness made Anty uncomfortable. He said, “Well, we don’t know yet if it’ll work or not. What can I do towards finding out? Everyone seems to be working on
something.
”

“Go and poke your nose in,” said Wu. “I mean it. Just go and poke your nose in. Find out why people think it won’t work, and tell them why it will. Damn it, it’s your plan! You go
make
it work!”

CHAPTER XII

A little timidly, Anty obeyed. Wu, with a parting nod, more perhaps of commiseration than commendation, had turned his back and walked away across the plaza to his own office. At random, Anty cast around for a place to begin; he chose a hut which proved to be full of a babel of shouted calculations.

“Anty!” someone cried as he opened the door. “Is this list of power requirements complete now?” A paper was thrust under Anty’s nose; he took it and tried to organize his racing thoughts enough to answer the question.

“Uh–you haven’t taken account of the need to duplicate the alien crew,” he ventured. “And won’t we have to keep our own transfax running continuously to bring stuff in from off-world?”

The compiler of the list snatched it back. “Don’t need to worry about that; we just keep ours idling and use the power available at the delivery end to get the stuff through. But you’re right about the duplication business, damn it. Anyone got any idea of the mass of one of these Others?”

“Better allow a hundred kilos,” suggested a girl running a manual computer, not interrupting the play of her fingers over its keyboard.

“Yes, but how many times over? Damn it, we’ll guess at twenty. If there are more, we can leave it to their imagination to guess that the others died and were buried on Ymir. What’s the average molecular weight of their protoplasm?” he added, trying to set a slide rule and talk at the same time.

“Bio would know,” the girl answered.

“I’m going that way,” offered Anty. “I’ll get them to call through with the data.”

The biochemists were huddled over a heap of cell charts; on a huge wallboard someone had already sketched a tentative mutation for an Ymiran microorganism which might convincingly infect the Others. “Anty!” said one of them as the door opened. “How the hell are we going to get a decent-sized sample of Ymiran germs? There aren’t any culture plants on Ymir.”

“Well–” Anty fumbled. “Wouldn’t Jaroslav be carrying some of the adaptable ones in his own mucous membranes when he came through?”

“Anty, you’re a genius,” the speaker replied. “If they can adapt to the warm environment of a human being–and we know some of them can–those are the ones we need to work with. Is Jaroslav coming?”

“If he doesn’t, he’ll be the only one,” someone replied absently.

“The technical section wants to know what the average molecular weight of the Others’ protoplasm is,” Anty said. The remark produced a dead silence for fifteen seconds.

“Average?”
echoed a man whose hands were delicately shaping a chromosome-structure analogue out of odd lengths of grooved plastic. “They’re the mathematical wizards; we’ll send them the total and tell them to work out the average themselves.”

“I guess that’ll do,” Anty agreed.

In the logistics section, as soon as the door opened to admit Anty, no less than three people yelled for his attention. The logistical question would be the toughest of all; it was no use being able to handle all the individual parts of the job unless they could be handled simultaneously and in the right order.

“What’s all this about?”

“Now look, you can’t expect–”

“There isn’t a hope of–”

Puzzled at their seeming obtuseness, Anty patiently explained what all this was about, why he did expect, and that there was not only a hope but a certainty of. He left that hut with a slight feeling of bafflement. Now that he had had a chance to think over the details, he was more and more convinced that his inspiration was workable. If he could demolish all the objections to it as easily as those last three, there was no doubt it would come off perfectly.

Only that again turned on one crucial point. He went to the detector room to check on it.

Katya Ivanovna was alone in the midst of the glowing signal lights, the quavering dials, the faintly humming apparatus. She did not look up as Anty came quietly in, but she greeted him in a gentle voice.

“Wait a moment, Anty. I’ve just got to establish this limit beyond question.”

Obediently, Anty remained silent near the door, looking at the equipment, wondering what it was going to tell them. Katya worked over her calculations, breathing heavily, occasionally muttering a quiet curse as something turned out unfavorably. At length she sighed and sat back in her chair.

“We can do it, Anty,” she said. “We can really do it. The power experts gave me their estimate five minutes ago, and I’ve just been reading off on the dials. We can pick up that ship about twenty-nine hours from now, and we can keep it for a day and a half at least before we have to put it back where it came from. Assuming nothing goes wrong, of course.”

She rustled papers together and swung her chair to face him.

“Congratulations!”

Anty avoided her gaze. “It doesn’t seem to me that I’ve done anything much,” he muttered, acutely aware of the lack of experience and the youth which he still bore with him.

“Nothing much, hey? We’ll see. Don’t let it worry you if you get a bit swollen-headed watching us go to work on your brilliant scheme. It’s going to be impressive.” She glanced at her watch. “Suppose we step into the plaza? I think it’s going to begin.”

“Already?” said Anty, astonished. “But you only just finished your calculations!”

Katya grinned. “You don’t think Wu would let a little thing like practicability stand in the way, do you? We’ve been ordering people to come here for more than half an hour.”

Through the windows of the hut, the glare from outside suddenly redoubled in intensity. “There goes the transfax,” Katya said. “Dark glasses, young man–quick, or we’ll miss the start of it.”

It was spectacular, not merely impressive. The three agents from Wu’s home world of K’ung-fu-tse were the first to arrive. They came straight through the transfax field in rockets, which soared vertically upwards, looped, circled and were already on their way to a landing when the next batch arrived.

“Verity!” called Katya to a white-haired woman sitting astride a sort of monstrous mechanical horse, which tugged a trailer-load of electrical equipment out of the transfax field. “What the deuce have you got there?”

“I pinched a complete broadcast power-unit off a new construction project,” Verity called back cheerfully. “I thought it would come in handy.” Catching sight of Anty, she gave a wild wave before lumbering off across the plaza with her vast vehicle.

After that people and equipment seemed to come in equal quantities. Counce came through from Earth, bringing nothing but his unparalleled experience. Then from Shiva; then from Zeus; then from New Peru; then more from Earth.

Watching, Anty felt a chill of sheer awe race down his spine. This was the organization to which he belonged to, to which he had given his life. An organization dedicated to a dream and a vision–without rules, except those they imposed on themselves, without any qualification for membership except the desire to serve one’s fellow man.

Like an army going into battle, they were assembling here from every world occupied by man, but especially from the mother-world of Earth. Those from the colder worlds stopped only to discard their outer clothing as they emerged into the blazing heat of Regis; those from tropical climates did not even waste that much time before going to work.

First, the transfax units–one to seize the raw plasma out of the sun; another (because the first would be totally destroyed by the fantastic heat) to reach across the parsecs and kidnap the alien ship. That one they sent up to the polar regions. It seemed that it had barely gone from sight before one of the rockets from K’ung-fu-tse took off awkwardly for the weight of a drum of power cable under its starboard wing and began to lay a snakelike thread of it across the landscape. A second followed it. That would be enough to convey the incredible flow of power for the few vital seconds.

Men and women had scrambled into spacesuits; now the main transfax was temporarily withdrawn from import duty and used to hurl a duplicate of itself, an assembly crew, and the complete broadcast power-unit Verity had brought from Boreas into orbit far overhead. When they seized the plasma from the sun, they would have to use the vacuum of space itself to insulate it, draw off its power on the spot, and broadcast it to ground in a tight beam.

Power cables spread over the base, like the web of a crazy spider; jury-rigged scaffolding canted upwards, carrying the power unit subassemblies. But there was more going on than could be plainly seen. In one of the huts Jaroslav was being deprived of a colony of involuntary fellow-travelers–germs native to Ymir, which were slapped into cold-culture dishes and used as the basis for the artificial “disease” the Others were to carry home with them. Far to the north, a team of men and women sweated and slaved to prepare the transfax for receiving the ship.

The sun went down; came up again. It still looked on a frantic hive of activity, but there was order where there had been chaos. Technicians were running preliminary tests now; there was time to snatch a bite to eat and a glass of water. Red-eyed with fatigue, Anty Dreean walked slowly through the midst of it all, wondering at his inspiration become reality.

“Anty!” said a familiar voice, and he turned to see Counce waving to him. A little shyly, because Counce was a great man, Anty returned the greeting.

“Good,” Counce said briefly, and made a gesture that took in the entire scene. There was no need to say more; Anty went on his way feeling that he had received an accolade.

A small group was emerging from Wu’s office: Wu himself, Katya, a woman so beautiful she could only be Falconetta, and a white-haired old man. Katya waved and called to Anty, who hurried across to them. They were engaged in frantic discussion.

“So you’re Anty Dreean,” said the very beautiful woman, giving him a smile that made him very much aware of his youthful susceptibility. “This is a fine idea you had, but there seems to be one thing you overlooked completely. What are we going to do with the aliens when we’ve got them out of their ship? Leave them to their own devices?”

“Why–” began Anty, and Katya interrupted.

“That’s unfair of you, Falconetta! Don’t worry, Anty. We have it in hand. This is Ram Singh, one of our greatest psychologists–the man who’s re-educating the people of Earth single-handed.”

The old man chuckled. “Trying to, and finding it hard. What we have to do, Anty, is to convince the Others that we intend them no harm. This will call for acting–communication in symbols. I produce television broadcasts, and I know quite a lot about communicating that way. So we shall see what we can do. First, though, we have to get the Others to Regis, and that’s the most important part.”

He glanced round at Wu, who nodded. “And we’re just about ready to do that now,” he said.

A technician gave a final check to the power-beam receiver and nodded with satisfaction. The transfax died into inactivity; everywhere men and women started to withdraw to their posts.

Taking up his hand amplifier, Wu went to the transfax platform and climbed up to survey the scene. Everywhere he looked, men and women signaled readiness. He licked his lips. Anty felt a sudden tightness grip his belly. Now?

“Now!”
said Wu, and his voice boomed through the amplifier. For an age-long instant, nothing seemed to happen; then Anty felt a touch on his arm. It was Falconetta.

“Look up there!” she said, pointing, and he looked. Overhead, so bright that it shone through the blue sky like a new star, gleamed a point of light: sun-stuff, ripped by men from its home to serve them in their hour of desperate need.