Collected Short Fiction, page 764
Odd-shaped objects taller than he was. Machines, perhaps, eternal as the seedship, designed maybe by the Master Builders on whatever faroff world they had ruled—designed to operate the craft for Attack Command? Carefully, making the most of his dwindling energy, he shuffled to inspect them.
Light flashed behind him.
Spinning to face it, he met the bug.
Most of those looming, box-like masses were time-tarnished metal, nearly black, but one was warm enough to glow like his own body, dully infrared. Taller than the rest, it stood far-off, at the end of a shadowy alley. If the others were a robot crew, shut down now, he thought this one might be the commander, still in operation. The bug had come from somewhere behind it. Gliding silently and fast, the thing stopped in the middle of that gloomy avenue, twenty meters away.
His own heat-energy had cooled too long. Swinging groggily to meet the bug, he found himself floating off the deck and had to make a desperate stab with one magnetic toe to get back. Unarmed and bewildered, too far gone even to plan any action, he could only hang there, waiting.
The bug lay still, the disk on its golden carapace turning slowly bright enough to show the wall of a thick-ribbed dome that curved up beyond the red-glowing block. The great craft’s nose, it arched high above him. Scanning it for any weapon the master program might let him use, for any hopeful chance, he found only ancient metal.
He saw the disk tipping toward him. The light of it focused to fix him with an unsteady beam. He yearned for another burst of its restoring radiation, but the swift-pulsed flicker stayed too faint to help him. A rattle of static. A soundless howl. A harsh, inhuman voice.
“Attack Command to Unidentified.”
“Guest—” he tried to say. “Guest to Attack—”
“Attention, Unidentified.” It cut him off. “You establish no authority for existence here. Attack Command requires your removal—”
“Removal not required!”
Trying to shout, he saw no hint that the bug received anything. It lay inert, looking as lifeless as any metal ingot. The flickering signal had ceased, but the gray-glowing face of the disk was still fixed upon him like a solitary eye, alertly hostile.
“Guest to Attack Command.” He tried again. “We do not resist. Our own commands protect you. All we seek is to survive—”
He saw the second bug.
Darting from somewhere about that red-glowing tower, it stopped close behind the first. They looked almost identical, featureless flat masses, but the second carried something else on its sleek yellow shell.
Something cylindrical, pointing at him.
He gathered his last energy and tried to sharpen his fading senses to study it. A dark hollow tube. A missile launcher—with a dark projectile already emerging! Desperately, he accelerated. Swaying aside, he reached fast enough but very gingerly to grasp it, let the momentum of its heavy little mass spin his body until its direction was reversed.
“Master Program to Defender!” The warning rang in his dimming mind, edged again with that mocking trace of Megan. “Advanced beings are not to be attacked—”
Obediently, as it left his fingers, he turned it slightly upward to let it miss the bugs. Before his vision went out, he saw that it would strike that red-glowing sentinel.
“Defender! You will not injure any being—”
The computer voice was fading, but its commands no longer mattered. All awareness dying, he was floating off the deck—
The blast had thrown him off the truck. He lay in foul-scummed mud, blood in his mouth, cold rain drumming on his back. A reek of spilled gasoline. Too near. He fought for breath, fought to drag himself farther, slid back into the muck.
A second soft explosion. A gentle roaring, louder than the rain. He heard the driver’s strangled prayer to the mother of God, heard Prieto screaming. Poor devils, but nothing he can do. Howls and hoarse curses. Three quick shots. Then only the roar of the fire, till the wet weeds on the bank above him began to hiss and crackle.
Heat, increasing. The rank stink of the charred weeds and bitter whiff of burning hair and flesh. Cold rain trickling. Salt sweat biting where the hide had been scraped off his hands and cheek. He needed to lie there longer, to get his breath and clear his throbbing head.
But the ammo—
Got to get farther while I can. Head up, and never mind the giddiness. Fight the muck and breathe the stink. Grab that bush. Claw up the bank. Slide back and try again—
A hard concussion. The ammo, too soon. Duck and run. Christ, my knee—Damn thing numb, and then the crunching pain. No good for anything. Down in the mud again on hands and the other knee, dragging the leg, scrambling for cover in the jungle.
One royal hell of a fix for an old pro at the game, but I’m not done for. Yet. Not if I can make it back to the wreck of the chopper and work the radio—
He was floating—
Somewhere in the dark. In the hospital tent, he thought at first. Under ether, maybe; he felt no pain, not even in his knee. Butch and Mascarenas must have come back with the other chopper to pick him up. But where were all the jungle croaks and chirps and shrieks? Where was anybody? Trying to turn in the bed, to see where he was, he found no bed. Only empty darkness all around him.
He was actually floating, his body turning slowly in the air—but here of course there was no air. He saw faint light and then the bugs, drifting above him under the black-ribbed vault.
Killed?
Watching their slow tumble, he saw no hint of life or action. Two odd-shaped slabs of dull-gold metal, they had no visible limbs or organs of sense, no wheels or tracks or anything else projecting. Even the shining disk and the missile launcher were gone.
Helpless, disabled and adrift in that frigid gloom, he clung to his dulled awareness and waited for some new attack. None came, and he wondered dimly why. If the great spacecraft had been left in orbit to defend the planet, why had it fought him so feebly? Perhaps, he thought, those missing landers had carried all its crew away, leaving only the robots aboard. And they, perhaps, after thousands of years, were running down.
His own rundown body kept very slowly spinning, like a tiny world in space. The two dead bugs went by again, like companion planets. The black vault climbed again above him, ominous sky with a pale moon in it. The moon was the disk. Floating near him, it was turning to light the deck beneath. When his own rotation let him see it, he found the shaft through which he had come, the radiating alleys of identical block-shapes around it, the taller thing the deflected missile had hit, now no longer glowing.
Dead!
“Master Program to Defender.” That cold internal reprimand shattered his momentary triumph. “You are defective. You have malfunctioned. You have killed advanced inhabitants—”
“The missile was their own.” Stubbornly, he defended his rebel self. “They fired it themselves, inside their own craft. They should have known it had to hit something.”
“The being it struck was killed.” The sternly brittle voice still held a hint of Megan, Megan sounding hurt. “A being of advanced intelligence.”
“If it was a being—”
The nearer bug was swimming back into view. Not quite floating, it was falling, as he himself was, drawn gently down toward the starcraft’s center of mass. He saw that it would pass close enough for his foot to reach it.
Nerved with a sudden hope, he twisted to find the drifting disk. It at least was still somehow alive, still luminous with energy he needed. Eagerly, he measured mass and distance and velocity. When the bug was near enough, he nudged it with one weak toe.
A feeble nudge, but enough to send him gently toward the disk. If not exactly toward it, maybe close enough. He waited, judged its motion, reached again. His fingers touched it, turned feebly magnetic, drew it to him.
Basking in its power, he wished it had been stronger—and wondered if his touch had turned it brighter. As that dead block-shape swam closer, he swung the disk to find the spot where the missile had struck.
A jagged hole blown in the dark metal case. Coiling cables beneath, and thin shelves crowded with close-spaced rows of glittering crystals. Oddly shaped and strange enough, yet arrayed like Rablon’s supercubes; he knew the shelves must be circuit boards.
“Defender to Ship!” Triumph surging high, he forgot that he was talking to himself. “The thing the missile hit was no live being. It’s a computer. On all the craft, I’ve found no sign of life. No atmosphere, no quarters or stores for any living crew.
“Which means we could try a landing—”
“Master Program to Defender.” Megan’s sad image quivered and vanished in his mind, a ghost he would never escape. “Repeat: mission cancelled. Encounter with advanced orbital craft is itself adequate evidence of highly evolved technology here.”
“But it didn’t evolve here. The nuclear drives—everything about the craft says it’s interstellar. It brought invaders here from another star. Sent out by something its computers called the Master Builders, operating under what they called Attack Command.”
“Master Program to Defender.” He hated its merciless insistence. “You found empty housings where their landing craft were carried. Your report implies that they reached the planet. If high technology exists there now, from whatever origin, it is forbidden to us.”
“We’ve scanned the planet,” he protested. “We got no data indicating any sort of technology there. Nothing electronic. No visible signs of advanced intelligence. Perhaps the things that tried to land were robots too. Maybe run down by now. Which means we aren’t stopped yet—“If I can get back where I belong!”
Hugged against his belly, the disk gave him a little life. He surveyed the deck as he fell closer, measured his way to the dark central pit. The shattered shell of the dead robot commander rose to meet him, and he thrust it aside with one bare foot.
Deflected, he fell back into the shaft. Its dark walls drifted slowly up, until a gray gleam struck through an oval door and he pulled himself out into the cold twilight that filtered through the tunnels from those empty berths.
Carefully, he launched himself out of the tube through the gloom toward the brightest tunnel mouth. Here, near the center of mass, his body flew true. He came out at last into the bottom of the hollow where a long landing craft had lain.
Into healing sunlight.
Anchored to the meteor-scarred metal at the tunnel’s lip, he drank it in. Slowly, the great craft rolled. The sun was gone too soon beyond the rim of the cavity, but it would be back. He watched the marching stars until the planet rose above the other rim.
Splendid and immense, now near the full, it looked close enough to touch. He traced the snaky rain-dazzle of wind-convergence around the equator, searched the blue-black zones of tropical ocean, found the cloud-piled archipelago and then the two great continents.
Red flecks of desert. White glints of ice. Wider green reaches half-veiled with cloud. Senses keener now, vision turning telescopic, he swept the visible land again and still found no hint of intelligent engineering. Searching the energy spectrum, he picked up only the rustling static of lightning in the storms. No evidence, he thought, that any invaders had ever landed.
“Defender to Ship,” he called into space. “Hostile action ended. No evidence of advanced life now existing here in orbit or on the planet. Mission can continue—”
“Ship to Defender.” The answer came instantly, bright with Megan’s gladness. Her smile flashed across his mind, so lovely that old agonies work to throb again. “Homing on your signal.”
He clung where he was, waiting for the ship and its haunting ghost of the woman he had loved—that they had loved, all those ghosts that haunted him. The good sun returned. Drinking in its golden wine, he pushed those poignant pains aside.
Chance wisps of a world dead forever in the black abyss behind them, they would never really matter. Why should he care whether Don Brink had ever gone to war again, or who had won Megan Drake? He was the defender, with this new world ahead, a fallow field so far as he could tell, waiting for him to plant and tend the human seed.
1985
At the Human Limit
“NEPTUNE?” The Tycoon snorted at the would-be explorer. “Forget Neptune! Too far beyond the human limit.”
That historic hoot had seeming reason. Smallest of the four giant gas planets, Neptune swings through eternal icy twilight thirty times Earth’s distance out, six times Jupiter’s. Its Sun is only a star, somewhat brighter than Earth’s full Moon but yielding no perceptible heat.
For humanity, Neptune promised nothing better than cruel hardship and killing difficulty. Yet the very next century bred pioneers bold enough to go there. Space rangers, they liked to call themselves, hardy souls who regarded stay-at-home Earth folk with an inborn scorn.
Evolution had already begun remolding them to dare a new human limit Not through any startling new mutation, but rather through selecting the best genes for space. Testing themselves through half a dozen generations, the rangers had terraformed Mars and the major moons of Jupiter, moved on from there to occupy Saturn’s icy satellites and prospect the meager moons of Uranus. Though still completely human, they were already a new human breed.
People fit for Earth had stayed there, people willing to endure stifling congestion and savage competition for the scant resources of a wasted planet. Or those unfortunates who simply lacked the means and nerve to get away.
With a new mix of genes winnowed from the vast human pool, the space rangers were people at home on the new frontier; people born with improved endurance for different gravities and rough accelerations; people with a better tolerance for synthetic atmospheres and hard radiations and long years of flight in free fall; people at ease in the limitless emptiness of space, who even relished its awesome splendors.
Knut Gunnarson led the way to Neptune. A tough-minded egoist, he claimed descent from the Viking rovers of an earlier Earth. He and his venturesome handful sealed themselves into a single tiny rocket for four bleak years, flying out from Phoebe, Saturn’s outermost moon.
They bypassed Uranus because too many others were already reaching their own limits there, too many Martians and Jovians and prospectors from the Belt, strangers crazed, so Gunnarson felt, with too many changing notions of faith and business and politics and justice.
Gunnarson wanted none of the new religions sweeping the decadent Sunward worlds. He hated the tightening grasp of the Sun Tycoons. In the aftermath of skirmish with a new Company governor bringing new laws, he took off too hastily, too poorly equipped and supplied.
Barely half his tiny crew were still alive when at last they looped close around Neptune and Triton and finally climbed back into orbit around Nereid, the outer satellite. Their first years there were as cruel as the voyage had been.
Neptune itself was mockery and menace, hanging dim and balefully blue green in the starry dark, offering nothing they knew how to reach. Its deep gravity well was a dangerous trap, its atmosphere a noxious smog, mercilessly cold at the surface, its hurricane winds and shifting magnetic fields hinting of enormous unknown forces at work in its unplumbable depths. With neither time nor gear to probe those haunting mysteries, they could only wonder.
They bypassed Triton, the massive inner moon, deep in its own hazardous gravity well. Seen from space, it showed them only crater-fanged highlands white with methane frost and lowlands pooled with inky seas of liquid nitrogen. Yet it tantalized them with its own hints of untouchable wealth.
Massive as the Earth’s Moon, and denser, it had to be rich in the heavy elements so rare and precious at this vast distance from the Sun. But it must have been molten, at least at the core, early in its history. Most of the heavy elements had separated out and sunk far from any easy reach.
Nereid, now their chosen home, was only a big snowball, perhaps a captured comet. Just as stark as the Saturnian moonlet they had left, it was small enough to let them land and leave again, and it offered the food and fuel they needed so desperately.
Raw stuff of the cosmos, those dirty snows were a blend of water ice, ammonia ice, and methane ice, salted with all the lighter elements. Refined, they could yield reaction mass for the rockets and feedstocks for the hydroponic gardens. They were raw stuff, too, for the plastics that would be essential here, where the heavier metals were so rare.
Scratching grimly just to stay alive, the colonists converted empty mass tanks into a narrow habitat and stripped every possible scrap of metal out of their craft to improvise a crude refinery to feed their crude hydroponic garden. Too crude to save most of them.
Ironically, that quick victory defeated the expedition. Most of the captured engineers were refugees from Earth who found old school friends in the Tycoon’s fleet. Their reunions led to a mutiny. One cruiser surrendered to the colonials and the crews of two others refused to fight. The loyal officers had to bargain hard for their lost ship, and all they took home was a proposed commercial treaty. The indignant Tycoon refused to sign the treaty, but he did agree to a limited diplomatic contact, sending missions intended to spy on the colonists.
Luther Chou came out as a cipher clerk with the first ambassador He was an able physicist and a secret rebel, embittered by the quota system then in effect, which denied him the laser-burned Sunmark of Company citizenship.
Chou deserted the mission and invented the pressure cell. That was a multilayered sphere of superconducting kwanlon, enormously strengthened by magnetic effects of his own discovery. It could be made selectively reflecting to control internal temperatures and strong enough to resist the enormous pressures of Neptune’s depths.
Chou built a robotic probe, shielded in the first experimental shell and equipped with recording telemetry. Its operating power came from Neptune itself, generated by atmospheric gases flowing through magnetohydrodynamic generators into empty pressure cells carried down by heavy ballast.
