The World Swappers (7 page)

CHAPTER XIII

The whole gigantic task, which had taken so many people so many hours to plan, lasted less than a fraction of a second.

First, they stole the plasma from the sun; the transfax which had seized it boiled instantly into nothing, or rather into insignificant, contaminating gases. They were ready to trap it in insubstantial but invulnerable bands of magnetic force, a tiny star from which they could drain the power they wanted.

This power they flashed to the ground below, in a beam so tight even the air through which it passed barely diminished its intensity. A receiver stood the shock for moments only, feeding the power into the cables which had been laid at rocket-speed across the face of the planet. The metal skeleton of the receiver glowed, burned although it was made of steel, stood out on the retinas of the watchers in vivid silhouette-like afterimages.

The cables burned too, sizzling across the horizon like a twofold train of gunpowder ignited with a match. Black oily smoke from the insulation drifted lazily in the light wind after the current had passed.

And in the cold arctic night, a group of silent people saw materialized before their eyes a ship that had not been built by human hands.

They had not calculated exactly right; the mass of the vessel was too great, and instead of dropping to rest on the area prepared for it, it sprawled across the transfax platform and crushed it to smithereens. There would be another ready by the time they had to send the vessel back. No one had time to worry about such small points as these; the main thing, the only thing, was that their incredible gamble had paid off.

For a long moment there was no reaction; then the tension dissolved into jubilation, and they clapped one another on the back and laughed out of sheer relief. Someone remembered to radio Main Base with the good news, and warn them that the transfax receiver up here was smashed.

When Wu received the message, he clambered down from the platform and gave Anty a thoughtful look. “Well, I warned you,” he said. “It’s gone off perfectly so far.”

“What’s this about?” demanded Falconetta, and Wu wryly repeated the warning he had earlier given to Anty.

“I don’t think Saïd finds his work unpleasant,” Falconetta commented. “But I’ll ask him sometime. Anty, is there any way of getting up to the north now the transfax is out there?”

“I’ll check,” said Anty obligingly, automatically dropping back into his accustomed role of newest recruit and errand boy. When he had hurried off, Ram Singh raised one fine white eyebrow at his companion.

“You had a reason for that,” he said. “You know perfectly well that whether or not the transfax is functioning at the polar base we can still be sent there with a little extra power. If Anty had thought for a moment or two, he would have seen that fact himself.”

Falconetta did not reply directly; instead, she looked at Wu. “That’s a nice boy you have there, Wu,” she said. “Why are you being unkind to him? Is it because you’re jealous?”

“Jealous? I suppose I am. I haven’t tried to do more than give him a fair appraisal of the problems facing him, though.”

“If he’s as capable as he seems, he’ll figure them out for himself.” Falconetta turned her smoky-yellow eyes speculatively after Anty. “He reminds me more than a little of myself, when I was new. He is an original, isn’t he?”

“Yes, that’s his born self.”

Anty was returning, and called out when he was still a dozen paces distant. “They’re warming up the transfax now for us to get to the northern base. They’re passing out protective clothing at the stores hut; I think we’d better get some and go right away.”

A few minutes later they walked through onto the bare, frosty ground, and saw the alien ship lying like a stranded whale under the harsh floodlights. They were only a short distance from the site of the excavation that had revealed the traces of the Others’ first visit to Regis, and Anty found himself contrasting the circumstances of the two ships’ arrivals. What would the reaction be of the inhuman minds in that enigmatic, almost featureless hull? What were they thinking? Had they any idea where they were? Perhaps they could tell from the star patterns, if the first ship that called here had made a record of them and passed it on.

They waited while Wu made a circuit of the perimeter. A battery of floodlights illumined each side of the ship, concentrating on the barely visible outline of the air-locks. The vessel itself was not unlike a human ship; after all, it was built to the same physical laws, driven by similar methods–there had to be some identity. Yet there was a difference, and Anty found his pulse quickening as it had done when he dug up the alien-made cathode-ray tube from the permafrozen ground.

Now, at last, the long-awaited moment of contact between the races was at hand. And thanks to his own idea, it was man who would dictate the circumstances. Ironical, that when they had devoted so much work to the cause they believed in–that man and alien should live in peace–when it came to this point they did not dare trust the aliens to act of their own accord.

Ram and Falconetta were discussing in low tones their project for making their peaceful intentions known to the Others. Anty wanted desperately to eavesdrop, but respected their obviously deliberate whispering.

Satisfied, Wu returned from his tour. “Well?” he said, addressing Ram. “Made your mind up?”

The old man inclined his white head. “I think so,” he answered. “We are agreed that it will be best to wait for some action by the aliens before we ourselves make any move. They will require some time to adjust to what has happened.”

“As you will,” conceded Wu. “In that case, I’ll reduce the watch to a rota, and give people a chance to go back to Main Base and rest and relax.”

He glanced at Anty. “How about you? You must be pretty well exhausted by now.”

“I think I’d prefer to stay and see what happens,” Anty ventured.

“I think he deserves to,” Falconetta put in, and Wu, after an instant’s hesitation, nodded and walked away.

But nothing did happen, Nothing at all.

As the hours ticked away, the biochemists began to worry about their carefully prepared cultures; the technicians began to wonder whether they would have time enough to duplicate the crew and plant the dummies aboard the ship, the men and women in the logistics section worried about getting the alien supplies out of the ship to provision the real crew members while they were stranded here on Regis. And Katya, in the detector hut back at Main Base, watched the line indicating the limit of their available power converge on the line indicating the theoretical course of the ship.

Six hours went by.

Wu called a hasty conference in the lee of an outcrop of rock, and Ram, Falconetta, Counce, Anty and two or three others stood shivering while they talked the situation over.

“As we see it, then,” Wu summed up, “one of two things must have happened. Either the shock of what has happened has stunned the crew into complete inactivity, which we regard as unlikely–or something has harmed them, some unlooked-for consequence of the ’faxing of their ship to Regis. We daren’t wait any longer for them to make a move. We shall have to move ourselves. What do we do?”

“Find out by direct inspection,” said Anty bluntly. He was more confident about speaking up now; everywhere, since his inspiration had paid off, he found his companions regarding him with new respect and no longer any hint of patronage.

“Explain,” commanded Wu.

Anty shrugged. “Put someone aboard the ship by transfax. I’d very much like to go myself.”

The others exchanged glances. “There doesn’t seem to be any alternative,” conceded Counce. He spoke for them all; the decision was taken.

Heart pounding, breath rasping in his throat, Anty opened his eyes. They had scanned the hull of the ship with sonar detectors, seeking an open space or compartment within. One near the stern, which gave echoes consistent with a partly-empty storage room, had been selected–and here he was. He had materialized a foot above the floor, so that he would have air to push aside, and not find himself partly embedded in a solid object. That sort of mistake resulted in explosions.

The thud as he dropped to the floor seemed to fill the universe; automatically Anty crouched into a corner and waited for fear one of the Others might have heard him arrive. He remained frozen for long minutes, studying his surroundings by the beam of a powerful flashlight.

Good guessing; this was indeed a storeroom, its walls lined with shelves and the shelves filled with flat, square containers stacked together. The shock of landing on Regis had scattered some of the neat piles and tipped them to the floor. When he rose from his cramped hiding place he had to walk carefully to avoid treading on them.

The door of the room opened easily once he had solved the mystery of its alien fastening. He slid it back in smooth-running grooves, and looked both ways along a corridor beyond. The alien lamps were redder than those used by humans; that was natural enough. They favored worlds with redder suns.

Cautiously, he ventured out into the passage and began to tiptoe towards the bow. The air was perfectly breathable–the Others liked roughly the same concentration of oxygen as did human beings. But it was cold, and vague but definite smells assailed his nose. Alien smells. Hints of ammonia, sulphur, other less definable odors.

A few yards ahead of him, there was an intersection. He was approaching it gingerly when a clattering noise made him draw back. Across the intersection hastened one of the blocky aliens, carrying indeterminate objects; he–or possibly she–was in such a hurry that he failed to spot Anty crouching in the shadows.

So they were neither in coma through psychological shocks, nor rendered incapable of action by physical damage. What, then, could be the reason for their absolute quiescence?

A sudden ring of brightness, crossed by shadows, struck down the right-hand passage from the direction in which the alien had gone. At the same time, a cool breeze could be felt. They had opened an airlock, then. At last they were coming out!

Vaguely disappointed that he would not after all be the first human being to confront an alien face to–to whatever the Others had to correspond to a face, Anty remained where he was.

A sharp report rang out. Another. Then there were bass-voiced, inhuman cries, and several more aliens ran across the intersection. This time Anty could see what the things were they carried. They were long tubes mounted on handles, with racks of blunt-nosed cylindrical objects attached at the side.

They were guns!

He started forward with a despairing cry, and came to the intersection. Looking towards the airlocks, he saw the Others piling out, wriggling past one of their number who was sighting his gun on an unseen target. He fired, and gave a grunt of triumph.

Then, attracted perhaps by Anty’s movements, he glanced down. Before Anty could say or do anything, the Other recognized him, dragged his weapon back over the rim of the airlock, and fired.

There was a vast pain in Anty’s chest. Something was dragging him off balance. A terrible weakness overcame him.

The last thing he saw before his eyes failed was redness glowing beyond the airlock, and the last thing he heard was the noise of the three rockets from K’ung-fu-tse, which had been patrolling overhead, as they swooped down howling toward the alien ship.

After that he knew nothing.

CHAPTER XIV

“I simply didn’t know it was possible to feel so depressed,” said Wu bluntly. Counce nodded, and gave a cursory glance around the perimeter of the site. It was like a battlefield. It
was
a battlefield.

Filthy, sweat-damp, hands covered with mud, the two men stood beside one of the still-functioning batteries of arc lights. The aliens had managed to shoot four of them out with their first burst, but the survivors, redistributed, were adequate for the work in progress.

“Not exactly a promising augury for future contacts, is it?” Counce said. “Anybody find out what happened to Anty?”

“I sent someone into the ship to bring out his body,” Wu answered.

“A pity, that. Still, he’s the tough kind–it shouldn’t do him any permanent harm.” Counce made as though to wipe his face with the back of his hand, saw the layer of crusted dirt on his skin, and changed his mind. “How many of us did they get altogether?”

“Eighteen dead. There are several seriously wounded–the medics are deciding now whether they’ll heal or whether they would do better to finish them and let them start again. I still haven’t pieced together a coherent picture of what happened.”

“It looked quite clear from where I was standing,” Counce declared. “They opened the airlocks simultaneously and shot out as many of the lights as they could; then a gunner at each lock covered for his companions as they piled out. It looks to me as if their commander gave them some guff about selling their lives dearly. Well, they did that all right.”

“I’d give my right hand to know why they were so sure we were hostile,” muttered Wu.

The party that had gone into the alien ship was starting to return; they handed Anty’s body down from the lock and two of their number half-carried, half-dragged it to the perimeter. After that they began to bring out the aliens’ supplies, and the other equipment that they might need.

“The poor bastards,” Wu said after a pause. “I hated to do what we did.”

“Well, we couldn’t just sit around and let them massacre us,” Counce snapped. “From the way this lot behaved, I get the impression they are slightly less than trustworthy. How many survivors were there in the end?”

“Just the one–a young male. I had him put over yonder in a tent, and they’re working on his injuries. I had a couple of computer experts assigned to build a language converter for him. By now they should have established the basics, if he’s co-operating at all.”

“So what are you thinking of doing about the ship?”

“We’ll put the corpses back aboard, after multilating them a bit more; then I propose to ’fax a hunk of Ymiran rock into the engine room, and we’ll put it back on its original course. Let them worry about it. We haven’t got time for anything more elaborate.”

A voice hailed him through a hand amplifier from the far side of the perimeter; he excused himself, and went to see what was wrong. Counce remained gloomily by himself under the glaring lights.

It was not a happy augury, this meeting. They had been perhaps overready to assume that the Others were prepared to meet mankind; on the recent showing, man was infinitely better fitted for the contact than the aliens were.

He sighed. From now on, therefore, they would have to devote still more of their exiguous resources to purely defensive matters; they would always have to be ready to kidnap alien ships, confuse the issue, muddle the Others and so stop them from realizing the truth.

Around him the situation slowly crystallized into action. They slammed the hunk of rock into the delicate mechanism of the engine room, producing a shattering explosion. The alien corpses would be battered past recognition; only the unkindest chance would reveal that death was actually due to the hot blast of rocket motors and not to accident. A quick operation with the transfax ripped a piece of the hull away; if they counted the dead bodies and found one short, that rip would explain the missing crewman.

Again they set up the power transmitters, again the racing rockets laid their trails of cable; again the plasma bloomed like a tiny star in orbit overhead. And the alien ship was gone with its cargo of death. Let the Others make of the mystery what they would; time was too short to tie up all the loose ends.

Counce’s every limb ached; his eyes were red with fatigue. He took a deep breath and drilled himself back towards action. There was the survivor, over yonder in a lighted tent. On that single survivor now depended whether or not the human race could persuade the aliens to accept and trust them.

The tent was a large one. In the center, under a reddish light suited to his organs of vision, the captive lay on a couch which had been taken from the ship. As he entered, Counce reflected on the creature’s appearance, which was neither ugly nor attractive by human standards; solid, thick-set, in a way, neutral. He wondered whether by some mischance he himself and other human beings might appear loathsome to the Others.

“Good evening, Saïd,” said the biologist working on the creature’s gashed limbs, glancing up from his task. But Counce ignored the greeting.

“Who put these straps on?” he said in a tone like thunder. He flung out his right arm and pointed to thick bands encircling the alien’s limbs, fastening them to the couch.

“We had to,” the biologist explained defensively. “He wouldn’t hold still for us to dress his wounds.”

“You must be out of your mind,” said Counce wearily, and thrust the man aside as he bent to undo the bonds.

“All right,” he said, standing back. “Get on with what you were doing.”

Apprehensively, the man started to obey; at a sudden movement from the captive, he drew back, flinching. “Get on with it, idiot!” Counce ordered. “By this time he must know you’re trying to help.”

The alien’s flat-eyed face watched them warily; Counce wondered what he would have been thinking in a similar position, and then realized there was no comparison. He would have had a hope to buoy him up–the hope of fruitful intercourse between the races. This alien was young, and probably had fully accepted the word of his superiors aboard the ship that men could only be enemies. There were painted symbols on his hard gray hide–what did they mean? An answer to that would have to wait.

But one small victory had been won; it seemed that the movement which had so startled the biologist had been intended only to present the injured limb more conveniently to his hands. Satisfied that the job was going smoothly now, Counce turned to the language technicians working on their converter at the back of the tent.

“How’s it going?” he demanded.

The nearer technician–a girl–raised her head, and Counce recognized her as one of Ram’s staff from Video India. “It isn’t going,” she said bluntly. “We know they use speech because we heard them during the fight, but since he came in here he hastn’t uttered a sound.”

“Do what you can anyway,” Counce answered, and with a final glance around he left the tent.

It was no use; he was exhausted, and he knew it. Even if the biologist’s action in strapping the alien down had been criminally thoughtless, he had been wrong in snapping at the man as he had. He needed sleep, and he needed it now.

In the shelter of a pile of miscellaneous crates and boxes, he found a discarded heap of protective clothing stripped from the eighteen who had died victims of alien bullets. Here, he decided, would do as well as anywhere; he threw himself down and was almost instantly asleep.

It was still dark when Counce awoke; Regis’s polar night was not yet past its middle. Hungry, but fantastically refreshed by his slumber, he got to his feet and went in search of news of what had passed.

The scene had changed again, radically; except for the tent where the alien lay, the site was deserted. Everyone would have gone back to base, of course; there was much to be done. Probably people would be hunting for him there. He saw that an emergency transfax unit had been left behind near the aliens tent, and he made towards it.

As he neared it, however, it burst into life, and someone stepped through from beyond. The sudden light dazzled him, and he shaded his eyes in an attempt to make out who the new arrival might be.

“Saïd!” exclaimed a familiar voice. It was Falconetta, nearly unrecognizable in the thick garments shrouding her slim body. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I am,” Counce answered, and explained briefly what had happened. “What’s going on at base?”

“Mainly, we’re replacing the casualties. Ram had to go back to Earth, but I said I’d stay to see what was being done about the alien. Do you know?”

“I haven’t had the chance to ask since I woke up. He’s over in that tent.”

Falconetta’s reply was to head briskly in that direction, and Counce automatically followed.

In the tent, the alien lay still, warily, watchfully studying his captors. The biologist had gone, to be replaced by a young man in a brown cloak; the two language experts were dozing over their computer, and three young men who had brought in a pile of alien supplies and a bowl of melted ice–which was necessary, they knew, to the Other’s metabolism–sat dispiritedly on chairs near the entrance.

“Not a thing,” said one of the last three in reply to the newcomers’ question. “He doesn’t move except to stretch his limbs; he won’t utter a sound, and he won’t take food or water.”

“How about the language converter?” Counce nodded at it.

“They tried him with all the possible basics. They didn’t get a peep out of him.”

“Sometimes I think we’re capable of the most dreadful stupidity,” Falconetta said suddenly. “Saïd, this poor creature probably thinks he’s being guarded with all these people around. Clear them out of the tent, will you?”

“And leave you alone with this thing?” said the previous speaker in alarm. “You must be crazy!”

“What could he do to me except kill me?” Falconetta snapped. “Out, all of you!”

They looked at Counce; after a moment’s pause, he nodded, and shook the language technicians into wakefulness. Bleary-eyed, bleary-minded, they raised no objection.

Outside under the winter stars they waited, shivering, wondering what was going on inside that tent. “Do you really reckon she knows what she’s doing?” one of the group asked of the air.

“If anyone does, she does,” Counce answered. They went on waiting.

And then the flap of the tent lifted. Limping, awkward, the alien came out, leaning his hugely solid body on Falconetta’s small shoulder.

Declining offers of assistance with urgent gestures, she helped the alien to a nearby pile of boxes, where he transferred his weight to their support and looked around. What his thoughts were as he recognized the place where his ship had lain, and realized that he was indeed totally alone among members of another race, they could not tell. But that did not matter. For the moment it was only important that another victory had been won; one of the Others had accepted help from a human being, not once, but twice.

Counce gave Falconetta a smile which said more than a million words.

They were waiting in silence for the outcome, when the transfax platform once more lit the landscape with its alarming brilliance, and a stranger walked, wild-eyed, into their midst. His face, his body, they had not seen before; he went unsteadily on his feet as though he had this moment learned to put them one before the other. After a few strides, he halted and looked at them, recognition dawning.

“Hello, Anty,” said Falconetta softly.