Collected Short Fiction, page 621
To a girl with haunted dark eyes, telling whispering sonic beads before a console of the Machine, the word came in a language that Man had not invented, and few men could understand. Her name was Delta Four, and she did not fear. She did not care at all . . . And that was how it began for them, and the wave of darkness raced on into infinite space.
Twelve minutes from the sun it swept Mars, halting the dedication of an enormous new project to extract oxygen and water from the dead crust of the planet. The Deputy Planner of Mars, a poorly planned individual who had seen the Writ of Liberation with his own eyes, snatched a gun from his honor guard and shot himself.
During the following quarter-hour that shadow bathed the asteroids, terrified a few, left others unconcerned. For they either did not know, being buried in the mining shafts that hollowed out the precious cores of the tiny planets, or they were so dazed and uncaring with the eternal hardship of their toil that nothing could frighten them again.
The racing wave of light overtook the scattered outposts of the Plan on the Moons of Jupiter. It darkened Saturn’s rings, swallowed the satellites of Uranus and Neptune. It fell upon the Spacewall Command complex on distant Pluto, where only those whose eyes fell upon the sun by chance noticed it—but they were afraid.
It drowned the Spacewall itself—more web than wall, a net of far-scattered stations whose laser beams and patrol craft kept watch on the little-known infinities beyond, alert to guard the Plan of Man against vagrants from the Reefs, or such enemies as the Starchild.
A wave of unexpected terror, it sent the crews of a thousand slow-wheeling spaceforts shouting to their emergency stations. It awakened sirens and horns on ten thousand lonely patrol ships. It set the laser beams winking with a million signals of confused alarm.
A day or so beyond Pluto it washed the frontiers of the solar system, the snowball protoplanets of solid methane and ammonia which the distant gravitational arms of the sun had never gathered into actual worlds.
And then at last, days beyond that last fearful outpost of the Plan, it began to bathe the Reefs of Space.
Out on the reefs, those living asteroids grown through unending ages by the minute fusorian organisms, feeding on the thin seas of interstellar hydrogen, the wave of shadow no longer meant terror. It was only another event, in a life that was filled with danger and surprise.
On one lonely worldlet a prospector stopped to peer in annoyance at where the sun had been. He fumbled in his pack for a luminous crystal of fusorian diamond, and bent over his drill again.
On another reef a lay preacher in the Church of the Star glanced at his watch, then at the sky. He was not afraid when he saw that Sol was gone from its accustomed position.
He had been expecting it.
He left his work to face the blue blaze of Deneb; knelt, whispered a few words of supplication and thanksgiving. Calmly then he bent back to the unfinished space boot on his last, for he was by trade a cobbler.
The shadow washed over a grave, but no one saw it. No one could have, for no one was there. Not even the cadaver; the grave was empty.
The shadow rested lightly on a city of stern, hard-faced refugees from the Plan of Man—on a great cluster of reeflets where a mighty space armada was being fashioned from fusorian steel—on a girl named Quarla Snow, who stood watching it flicker out with tears bright in her eyes.
On another living rock, a herdsman stood guarding a calving member of his herd from a flight of marauding pyropods. Lying behind a sheltering ledge of organic iron, one eye on his parturient spaceling while he searched out the armored killers with frugal flashes from his laser gun, he failed to notice that the sun had gone out.
That was how it began, for every man, woman and child alive.
And thirty-nine minutes later the sun began again its mighty outpouring of heat and light, but the wave of brilliance that followed the dark looked down on a changed solar system.
The sun’s atomic engines ran again. Hydrogen fused into helium, through the carbon cycle. Filtered energy flowed toward the solar surface. Radiation poured into space.
Three minutes from the sun, the wave of radiation crashed against that insulated dome on Mercury. It was recorded by the clucking camera, analyzed by the thousand automatic instruments. Sobbing with joy—or fear!—the blinded astronomers flashed the word to Earth: The sun lives again!
But its light reached Earth before their message.
That first rebirth of light brushed a high mountain on Earth, where the Planner sat on his golden chair, the gray metal falcon that perched on his shoulder darting a red-eyed glare about the room, whirring its steel wings. The Planner was staring at a sheet of creamy parchment which bore the heading:
WRIT OF LIBERATION
It had been delivered to him by the hand of one of his own guards, who had found it at his door. It aid:
The Starchild requires the release of all of his followers who are held in the service of the Plan of Man by security collars.
The Starchild requires that all of his followers who have been consigned to the Body Bank for salvage shall be restored to their original state, and then that they too shall be released.
The Starchild finally requires that the barrier called the Spacewall shall be dismantled, and that free passage between the worlds of the Plan and the Reefs of Space shall be permitted.
The Starchild is aware that the Plan of Man considers itself invulnerable, and thus he has arranged a warning demonstration. At the moment of the vernal equinox on Earth the sun will be extinguished. Twelve near stars will blink.
If the Planner fails to meet the Starchild’s requirements after this demonstration, further measures will be taken. These will result in the destruction of the Plan of Man.
“Unplanned nonsense,” groaned the Planner. “Impudence! Treason!” A tall Technicolonel said uneasily, “Sir. We must take measures . . .”
“Measures,” grumbled the Planner, while his steel falcon clashed its pinions. “What does the Machine say?”
A girl in a hooded gown said: “No data, sir.” Her voice was like distant music, her expression serene.
“No data! Find me some data! Find who this Starchild is! Tell me how he did this thing—and how I can stop him from doing it again!” The Technicolonel coughed. “Sir, for some years we have had reports of a Church of the Star. A new religion, apparently springing from the Reefs—”
“Always the Reefs! They should have been destroyed twenty years ago!”
“Yes, sir. But they were not. And the pioneers—that is, sir, the tramps and vagabonds on the Reefs—they invented new superstitions. They worship, I believe, the star Deneb. Alpha Cygni—the star at the top of the Northern Cross. They have imagined a paradise on the planets that they imagine to orbit around it. They wish to migrate there, or some of them do—though at maximum drive for conventional spacecraft,” he continued earnestly, “they might average some one per cent of the speed of light, in which case Deneb, at four hundred light-years distance, would not be reached for forty thousand—”
“Get to the point!” cried the Planner fretfully. “What about the Starchild?”
“Well, sir, we had heard rumors of such a person in our investigations of this cult. Sometime ago we decided to send a—uh—a special investigator to secure intelligence concerning him and it. The investigator’s name was Boysie Gann, sir, and—”
“Bring him to me! Is he here on Earth?”
“Yes, sir. But—well, sir, he did not return as we expected. In fact—” the Colonel’s face was a picture-puzzle of confusion—“I must confess, sir, that we don’t properly know how he did return, as—”
“Fool!” shouted the Planner. “Bring him to me! Never mind what you don’t know. Bring me Boysie Gann!”
. . . And that too was how it began; but in fact some parts of it began earlier.
For Boysie Gann it began many months earlier, when he was a spy.
II
For Boysie Gann the beginning was on Polaris Station, that great metal wheel that floats in the icy space past Pluto, one link in the Spacewall between the Plan of Man planets and the Reefs.
Boysie Gann was twenty-six years old and already a Machine Major.
Boysie Gann was six feet tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed. He was broad through the shoulders and slim at the waist. He moved like a cheerful cat. He looked like a fighter, and he was.
He reported aboard the Polaris Station with a grin and a disarming look out of his bright blue eyes. “Boysie Gann reporting, sir,” he told the deck officer. “Technicadet Gann, at your service.” And that was a cheerful lie. He was no cadet, but at the spy school on Pluto the briefing officers had given him a new rank to make his job easier. A Machine Major was a man of importance. He would be watched. A cadet could go anywhere, see anything.
The deck officer assigned him quarters, procured him help in stowing his gear, shook his hand to welcome him aboard, and ordered him to report to the commandant of the Station, Machine Colonel Mohammed Zafar.
Gann’s assignment was to investigate rumors of strange anti-Plan activities on the Polaris Station. Gann was a soldier of the Plan, and he could hardly conceive of anything anti-Plan that was not at the same time corrupt, slovenly, evil and wrong. He had come to the station expecting to find it rundown and rusty, manned by surly malcontents.
Yet the discipline was good. The men were on their toes. On the way through the plastic passages of the wheel, stepping high in the light gravity of the station’s spin, he saw that the metalwork was bright. Confusing, thought Gann, mildly perplexed; but he knew his duty and he knew how to do it.
He knocked on the door of the commandant’s office and was ordered inside. He came to full attention and a brisk salute.
“Technicadet Gann reporting as ordered, sir!”
The Machine Colonel returned his salute methodically. Here, too, Gann was faintly surprised, though he allowed none of the surprise to show through his military bearing and engaging grin. Machine Colonel Zafar was a short brown man in meticulously pressed dress whites, who looked as solid and enduring as the Plan itself. “Welcome aboard, cadet,” he said. “Give me your orders, please.”
“Yes, sir!” Gann’s orders were also a lie. They showed him to be a relief laser operator fresh out from Earth. They did not mention his true rank, or his intensive training on Pluto. The commandant read them carefully, then nodded.
“Cadet Gann,” he said in his soft, precise voice, “we are glad to have you on Polaris Station. As you know, this station is a major unit in the Spacewall. Our primary job is to detect and intercept any unauthorized traffic between the Plan of Man and the areas beyond Pluto—the wastes that are called the Reefs of Space. Our secondary job is to monitor as much activity in the Reefs as possible. Our radar, laser and optical systems are the heart of our mission—and so, Cadet Gann, what you do is the most important part of our work here. Don’t fail us.”
“Sir!” said Boysie Gann earnestly, “I won’t fail you! I serve the Plan of Man without question or pause!” And he saluted and left.
But before he left he dropped his orders and retrieved them, with a flashing grin of apology to the colonel.
He left with his shoulders high. For in the instant when he was bent out of the commandant’s sight, picking up his papers, he had planted a listening bug under the projecting rim of Machine Colonel Zafar’s desk.
Within an hour of Gann’s arrival on Polaris Station he was fitted with an iron collar.
He had expected it. In so sensitive an installation as the station, every man wore one of the Machine’s collars, so that at any instant, wherever he might be, any one of them could be destroyed. There was no other way. A space man gone amok—a traitor loose in the fuel stores—a drunken armorer at the studs of the station’s mighty missiles—any individual could do so much harm that it was necessary to have instant control over every man aboard.
Still, it was an uncomfortable feeling. Gann touched the collar lightly, and for once the smile was gone from his cheerful face. It was disturbing to know that someone somewhere—the distant Machine on Earth, or one of its satellites nearby; a security officer on Pluto, or the commandant here on the station—could at the surge of a radar pulse detonate the decapitation charge.
His bunkmate was a tall, lean Nigerian, Technicadet M’Buna. Lounging in the security office, waiting for Gann, M’Buna saw his involuntary gesture and laughed. As he held the door and they started off to their duty post M’Buna said, “Makes you nervous, eh? Don’t worry. If it goes off, you’ll never know it!”
Gann grinned. He liked M’Buna, had at first encounter already realized that here was an intelligent, patient friend. Yet he said at once, “Nobody likes a collar. And—” he acted a pause, glancing around. “I hear there are people somewhere who do something about it. Out on the Reefs. Men who know how to get the collars off . . .” M’Buna said uncomfortably, “I wouldn’t know anything about that. Here’s our station.”
Gann nodded and let it pass. But he had not failed to notice that M’Buna had overlooked one essential act. What Gann said hinted at treason to the Plan. M’Buna’s duty was clear: He should have called Gann on it and established exactly what was meant by the hint. And then reported Gann at once.
Huge as an ocean liner, flimsy as a dragon-kite, Polaris Station was a big plastic wheel. Its spin was just fast enough to keep the crew’s soup in the plate and the plate on the table. The hub was stationary, with the radar-laser search dome on the north face, the entry locks on the other.
The station had been set up first, more than ; quarter-century before, as a base for exploring the Reef cluster immediately to the galactic north of the sun. The snowball that had supplied reaction mass for the old nuclear rockets was still in detector range, swinging a hundred miles from the station in their coupled orbits. Now there was no need for reaction mass, but the snow-asteroid still had its uses. It served as a cosmic garbage dump, the unreclaimed wastes and offal of the station hauled out there after every watch and left on its surface so that free-orbiting particles of trash would not return false signals to the search instruments back at the station.
Within forty-eight hours of reporting aboard the station, Machine Major Boysie Gann had bugged the offices of the commandant, the executive officer, the quartermaster and the intelligence chief. Each tiny instrument was broadcasting a sealed-wave pickup of every word that was uttered in those sacrosanct chambers. Gann himself spot-monitored the transmissions when time allowed. The rest of the time the great records machine on Pluto received the signals, taped them and transmitted them to Earth and die buried citadel of the Planning Machine itself.
But all his bugs produced nothing.
Gann’s orders had been less than explicit: Seek out and identify enemies of the Plan. Beyond that there had been only rumors. A vast smuggling enterprise, shipping valuable strategic materials from the inner Plan Worlds to the Reefs. A strange new cult that threatened to unite the reefs against the inner planets. A leader preaching a hegira. A security leak . . . But which of these was true, if any, Gann had not been told. It was not security doctrine to tell agents precisely what they should be looking for, on the grounds that their time was most productively employed when they could develop and follow up on many of their own leads.
Yet here there were no leads at all.
No real leads, at least. A few unguarded remarks at mess. Some slipshod accounting of spare parts for the laser banks. These were anti-Plan irregularities, to be sure, and men had gone to the Body Bank for far less. Men would go to the Body Bank for them now, from Polaris Station, for Gann had promptly filed the names and data. But he was certain that what he should be looking for was something bigger and worse than an occasional disgruntled or sloppy officer.
Within one week Gann had proved to his own satisfaction that if there was any major anti-Plan activity going on, it was not on Polaris Station.
He had to look elsewhere.
But where else was there?
. . . It wasn’t until he had been there twice that he realized where the “elsewhere” had to be.
Like all the noncommissioned personnel, Gann took his share of KP, garbage detail, cleanup orderly and so on. It was not usually a burdensome chore. The radar ovens and cybernated housekeepers did all the work; the only thing left for the men in charge was to make sure they were working properly. Even the short hop from station to the snowball for garbage disposal was a welcome break in the routine.
He shared his garbage tour with M’Buna, and they spent their time chatting desultorily at the controls of the “scow”—actually a reactionless space-tractor—while the garbage pods steered, unloaded and returned themselves. M’Buna had never referred to Gann’s leading remark about collars. Nor had Gann ever been able to draw him into any unplanned talk; he had given up trying. They talked about home. They talked about promotion. And they talked about girls.
For Gann there was one girl, and her name was Julie Martinet. “No bigger than a minute, M’Buna,” he said earnestly, “and with those beautiful dark eyes. She’s waiting for me. When I come back—”
“Sure,” said M’Buna. “Now, this girl I knew in Lagos—”
“You’re talking about a girl,” said Gann. “Julie is the girl. The only one who matters.”
“How come you never get any mail from her?” asked M’Buna.
And Gann froze.
“She doesn’t like to write letters,” he said after a moment, but inside he was cursing himself. So foolish a slip! There was a reason, and a perfectly good one, why he got no letters from Julie Martinet. They were piling up for him on Pluto, he was sure of that; but they could not be forwarded here. There was too much risk of someone reading one, and learning from some chance comment that Gann was not the simple laser tech he appeared.
As soon as he could Gann changed the subject. “Say,” he said, “what’s that on the scope?” It was a tiny blip, settling down feather-light toward the surface of the snowball protoplanet. A clutter of trash, of course. Nothing more. It was by no means unusual for some part of the garbage cargo to rebound from the tenuous clutch of the snowball’s gravity and wheel around in space for minutes or hours before finally settling into place.
