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‘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.’
He had not finished speaking before Rhys-Barley had flung himself behind a shield and given the Emergency Destruction order. Nothing happened. Buttons, switches, valves, all were dead.
‘You merely waste your time,’ Little Light said, pointing at the Grand-Admiral and stepping through the dying R-rays. ‘The power has gone. Did I not explain that clearly enough?’
‘Where are you taking us?’ Deeping whispered.
‘You are taking us,’ Woebee corrected.
‘Not – not to Earth?’
Woebee smiled. ‘I feel that the word ‘Earth’ has some emotional value for you.’
‘Why, yes, of course. Don’t you see, it’s the only planet we ever lost to the Boux, right at the beginning of our troubles with them. But Man came from there. Earth is Man’s birth planet, and when it fell – that was the end of the First Empire. Since then we’ve grown stronger – but all that old peripheral region of space is dead ground to us now.’
Woebee nodded carelessly. ‘We learned that from our investigation of Main Base. The area is now abandoned by the Boux too.’
‘How awful to think of it stagnating all this time!’ Deeping said.
‘Really, you are as foolish as the rest,’ said the Preacher reprovingly. ‘The stagnation has been here. Why, you’re still clinging to machinery to support you.’ He led his four friends back toward the Regalia. ‘We’ll do the rest of the journey on our own,’ he told them. ‘These soldiers will want to go back to their duties. It’s really none of our concern to hinder them!’
In the lock they paused. The personnel trapped in the Interrogation Bay looked bemused and helpless. Rhys-Barley sat on a step staring at the wall. The Captain bit his nails in an absorbed fashion.
Aliens Officer came forward and said: ‘You have so much you could have taught us.’
‘There’s one piece of knowledge, unlike most of our kind of knowledge, that might be useful to you,’ Aprit said casually. ‘In Man’s hurry to leave Earth because one or two Boux had arrived, some few men and women were left behind. They had no defence against the Boux, so the Boux had no need to attack them. In other words, there was an opportunity for – intermarriage.’
‘Intermarriage!’ echoed Aliens Officer.
‘Yes,’ the Preacher said solemnly. ‘Neither you nor your machines seemed able to diagnose that. So you see our origins are a mixture of Man’s and Boux’s …’
‘That is a priceless piece of knowledge,’ Deeping reflected.
Calurmo smiled a valedictory smile that included even the deflated Admiral.
‘I’m delighted if it proves so,’ he said, ‘but it is only a just return for Man’s priceless gift to the Boux who were our distant ancestors: the gift of rigid form. Fluidity has proved a curse to the Boux. Intermarriage has recommendations for both sides. May I suggest you arrange – a love-match?’
This time he remembered to close the airlock doors. The Regalia slid, apparently of its own volition, into the great lock of the Pointer and out into space. By the time it was heading home, the flagship’s captain was busy roaring at his bridge officers and Grand-Admiral Rhys-Barley was speaking apologetically to Base.
Deeping was staring at something that had materialized in his hand: wood sorrel, Oxalis acetosella. A flower from Earth.
Outside (#ulink_fd67ccef-0cf9-53aa-8309-7e4a669493dd)
They never went out of the house.
The man whose name was Harley used to get up first. Sometimes he would take a stroll through the building in his sleeping suit – the temperature remained always mild, day after day. Then he would rouse Calvin, the handsome, broad man who looked as if he could command a dozen talents and never actually used one. He made as much company as Harley needed.
Dapple, the girl with grey eyes and black hair, was a light sleeper. The sound of the two men talking would wake her. She would get up and go to rouse May; together they would go down and prepare a meal. While they were doing that, the other two members of the household, Jagger and Pief, would be rousing.
That was how every ‘day’ began: not with the inkling of anything like dawn, but just when the six of them had slept themselves back into wakefulness. They never exerted themselves during the day, but somehow when they climbed back into their beds they slept soundly enough.
The only excitement of the day occurred when they first opened the store. The store was a small room between the kitchen and the blue room. In the far wall was set a wide shelf, and upon this shelf their existence depended. Here, all their supplies ‘arrived’. They would lock the door of the bare room last thing, and when they returned in the morning their needs – food, linen, a new washing machine – would be awaiting them on the shelf. That was just an accepted feature of their existence; they never questioned it among themselves.
On this morning, Dapple and May were ready with the meal before the four men came down. Dapple even had to go to the foot of the wide stairs and call before Pief appeared, so that the opening of the store had to be postponed till after they had eaten; for although the opening had in no way become a ceremony, the women were nervous about going in alone. It was one of those things …
‘I hope to get some tobacco,’ Harley said as he unlocked the door. ‘I’m nearly out of it.’
They walked in and looked at the shelf. It was all but empty.
‘No food,’ observed May, hands on her aproned waist. ‘We shall be on short rations today.’
It was not the first time this had happened. Once – how long ago now? – they kept little track of time – no food had appeared for three days and the shelf had remained empty. They had accepted the shortage placidly.
