For Ramrobot #143, speed built up rapidly over the years. The sun became a bright star, then a dim orange spark. The drag on the ramscoop became a fearsome thing, but it was more than compensated for by the increase in hydrogen pouring into the fusion motor. The telescopes in Neptune’s Trojan points occasionally picked up the ramrobot’s steady fusion light: a tiny, fierce blue-white point against Tau Ceti’s yellow.
The universe shifted and changed. Ahead and behind the ramrobot the stars crept together, until Sol and Tau Ceti were less than a light-year apart. Now Sol was dying-ember red, and Tau Ceti showed brilliant white. The pair of red dwarfs known as L726-8, almost in the ramrobot’s path, had become warm yellow. And all the stars in all the heavens had a crushed look, as if somebody heavy had sat down on the universe.
Ramrobot #143 reached the halfway point, 5.95 light-years from Sol as measured relative to Sol, and kept going. Turnover was light-years off, since the ramscoop would slow the ship throughout the voyage.
But a relay clicked in the ramrobot’s computer. It was message time. The ramscoop flickered out, and the light died in the motors as Ramrobot #143 poured all her stored power into a maser beam. For an hour the beam went out, straight ahead, reaching toward the system of Tau Ceti. Then the ramrobot was accelerating again, following close behind her own beam, but with the beam drawing steadily ahead.
A line of fifteen-year-old boys had formed at the door of the medcheck station, each holding a conical bottle filled with clear yellowish fluid. One by one they handed their specimen bottles to the hard-faced, masculine-looking nurse, then stepped aside to wait for new orders.
Matt Keller was third from the end. As the boy in front of him stepped aside, and as the nurse raised one hand without looking up from her typewriter, Matt examined his bottle critically. “Doesn’t look so good,” he said.
The nurse looked up in furious impatience. A colonist brat wasting her time!
“I better run it through again,” Matt decided aloud. And he drank it.
“It was apple juice,” he said later that night. “I almost got caught sneaking it into the medcheck station. But you really should have seen her face. She turned the damndest color.”
“But why?” his father asked in honest bewilderment. “Why antagonize Miss Prynn? You know she’s part crew. And these medical health records go straight to the Hospital”
“I think it was funny,” Jeanne announced. She was Matt’s sister, a year younger than Matt, and she always sided with him.
Matt’s grin seemed to slip from his face, leaving something dark, something older than his years. “One for Uncle Matt.”
Mr. Keller glared at Jeanne, then at the boy. “You keep thinking like that, Matthew, and you’ll end up in the Hospital, just like he did! Why can’t you leave well enough alone?”
His father’s evident concern penetrated Matt’s mood. “Don’t worry, Ghengis,” he said easily. “Miss Prynn’s probably forgotten all about it. I’m lucky that way.”
“Nonsense. If she doesn’t report you, it’d be through sheer kindness.”
“Fat chance of that.”
In a small recuperation room in the treatment section of the Hospital, Jesus Pietro Castro sat up for the first time in four days. His operation had been simple though major: he now had a new left lung. He had also received a peremptory order from Millard Parlette, who was pure crew. He was to give up smoking immediately.
He could feel the pull of internal surgical adhesive as he sat up to deal with four days of paperwork. The stack of forms his aide was setting on the bedside table looked disproportionately thick. He sighed, picked up a pen, and went to work.
Fifteen minutes later he wrinkled his nose at some petty complaint—a practical joke—and started to crumple the paper. He unfolded it and looked again. He asked, “Matthew Leigh Keller?”
“Convicted of treason,” Major Jensen said instantly. “Six years ago. He escaped over the edge of Alpha Plateau, the void edge. The records say he went into the organ banks.”
But he hadn’t, Jesus Pietro remembered suddenly. Major Jansen’s predecessor had gone instead. Yet Keller had died…“What’s he doing playing practical jokes in colonist medcheck station?”
After a moment of cogitation Major Jensen said, “He had a nephew.”
“Be about fifteen now?”
“Perhaps. I’ll check.”
Keller’s nephew, said Jesus Pietro to himself. I could follow standard practice and send him a reprimand.
No. Let him think he’d got away with it. Give him room to move around in, and one day he’d replace the body his uncle stole.
Jesus Pietro smiled. He started to chuckle, but pain stabbed him in the ribs and he had to desist.
The snout projecting from the ramscoop generator was no longer bright and shiny. Its surface was a montage of big and little pits, craterlets left by interstellar dust grains pushing their way through the ramscoop field. There was pitting everywhere, on the fusion motors, on the hull, even on the cargo pod thirty miles behind. The ship looked pebble-finished.
The damage was all superficial. More than a century had passed since the rugged ramscoop design had suffered its last major change.
Now, eight and a half years beyond Juno, the ramscoop field died for the second time. The fusion flames became two actinic blue candles generating a twentieth of a gee. Slowly the cargo spool rewound until the cargo pod was locked in its socket.
The machine seemed to hesitate…and then its two cylindrical motors rose from the hull on their praying-mantis legs. For seconds they remained at right angles to the hull. Then, slowly, the legs contracted. But now the motors pointed forward.
A U-shaped bar swung the cargo pod around until it also pointed forward. Slowly the spool unwound to its full length.
The ramscoop went on again. The motors roared their full strength, and now they fired their long streams of fusing hydrogen and fused helium through the ramscoop itself.
Eight point three light-years from Sol, almost directly between Sol and Tau Ceti, lie the twin red dwarf stars L726-8. Their main distinction is that they are the stars of smallest mass known to man. Yet they are heavy enough to have collected a faint envelope of gas. The ramrobot braked heavily as her ramscoop plowed through the fringes of that envelope.
She continued braking. The universe stretched on again; the stars resumed their normal shapes and colors. Eleven point nine light-years from Sol, one hundred million miles above the star Tau Ceti, the machine came to an effective stop. Her ramscoop went permanently off. A variety of senses began searching the sky. They stopped. Locked.
Again she moved. She must reach her destination on the remaining fuel in her insystem tank.
Tau Ceti is a G8 star, about four hundred degrees cooler than Sol and only forty-five percent as strong as its output of light. The world of Mount Lookitthat orbits sixty-seven million miles away, a moonless world in a nearly circular path.
The ramrobot moved in on Mount Lookitthat the world. She moved cautiously, for there were fail-safe factors in her computer program. Her senses probed.
Surface temperature: 600 degrees Fahrenheit, with little variation. Atmosphere: opaque, dense, poisonous near the surface. Diameter: 7650 miles.
Something came over the horizon. In visible light it seemed an island in a sea of fog. A topography like a flight of broad, very shallow steps, flat plateaus separated by sheer cliffs. But Ramrobot #143 sensed more than visible light. There was Earth-like temperature, breathable air at an Earth-like pressure.
And there were two radio homing signals.
The signals settled it. Ramrobot #143 didn’t even have to decide which to answer, for they were coming from only a quarter of a mile apart. They came, in fact, from Mount Lookitthat’s two slowboats, and the distance between them was bridged by the sprawling structure of the Hospital, so that the spacecraft were no longer spacecraft but odd-looking towers in a sort of bungalow-castle. But the ramrobot didn’t know that and didn’t need to
.
There were signals. Ramrobot #143 started down.
The floor vibrated gently against the soles of his feet, and from all around came muted, steady thunder. Jesus Pietro Castro strode down the twisting, intermeshing, labyrinthine passages of the Hospital.
Though he was in a tearing hurry, it never occurred to him to run. He was not in the gymnasium, after all. Instead he moved like an elephant, which cannot run but can walk fast enough to trample a running man. His head was down; his stride was as long as his legs could reach. His eyes looked ominously out from under prominent brow ridges and bushy white eyebrows. His bandit’s moustache and his full head of hair were also white and bushy, forming a startling contrast to his swarthy skin. Implementation police sprang to attention as he passed, snapping out of his way with the speed of pedestrians dodging a bus. Was it his rank they feared or his massive, unstoppable bulk? Perhaps even they didn’t know.
At the great stone arch which was the main entrance to the Hospital, Jesus Pietro looked up to see a sparkling blue-white star overhead. Even as he found it, it winked out. Moments later the all-pervading thunder died away.
A jeep was waiting for him. If he’d had to call for one, someone would have been very sorry. He got in, and the Implementation chauffeur took off at once, without waiting for orders. The Hospital fell behind, with its walls and its surrounding wasteland of defenses.
The ramrobot package was floating down on its parachutes.
Other cars were in flight, erratically shifting course as their drivers tried to guess where the white dot would come down. It would be near the Hospital of course. The ramrobot would have aimed for one or another of the ships; and the Hospital had grown like something living, like a growth of architectural coral, between the two former spacecraft.
But the wind was strong today.
Jesus Pietro frowned. The parachute would be blown over the edge of the cliff. It would end not on Alpha plateau, where the crew built their homes and where no colonist could be tolerated, but in the colonist regions beyond.
It did. The cars swooped after it like a flock of geese, following it over the four-hundred-foot cliff that separated Alpha Plateau from Beta Plateau, where forests of fruit trees alternated with fields of grain and vegetables and meadows where cattle gazed. There were no homes on Beta, for the crew did not like colonists so close. But colonists worked there, and often they played there.
Jesus Pietro picked up his phone. “Orders,” he said. “Ramrobot package one-forty-three is landing in Beta, sector…twenty-two or thereabouts. Send four squads in after us. Do not under any circumstances interfere with cars or crew, but arrest any colonist you find within half a mile of the package. Hold them for questioning only. And get out here fast.”
The package skimmed over half an acre of citrus trees and came down at the far edge.
It was a grove of lemon and orange trees. One of the later ramrobot packages had carried the grove’s genetically altered ancestors, along with other miracles of terrestrial biological engineering. These trees would not harbor any parasites at all. They would grow anywhere. They would not compete for growth with other similarly altered citrus trees. Their fruit remained precisely ripe for ten months out of the year; and when they dropped the fruit to release the seeds, it was at staggered intervals, so that at any time five trees out of six held ripe fruit.
In their grim need for sunlight the trees had spread their leaves and branches into an opaque chain, so that being in the grove was like being in a virgin forest. Mushrooms grew here, imported unchanged from Earth.
Polly had already picked a couple of dozen. If anyone had asked, she had gone into the citrus woods to pick mushrooms. By the time her hypothetical questioner arrived, she would have hidden her camera.
Considering that the tending season was a month away, a remarkable number of colonists were abroad on Beta Plateau. In woods, on the plains, climbing cliffs for exercise, hundreds of men and women were on excursions and picnics. An alert Implementation officer would have found their distribution improbably even. Too many would have been recognized as Sons of Earth.
But the ramrobot package chose to land in Polly’s area. She was near the edge of the woods when she heard the thump. She moved swiftly but quietly in that direction. With her black hair and darkly tanned skin she was nearly invisible in the forest dusk. She crawled between two tree trunks, moved behind another, and peered out.
A large cylindrical object lay on the grass beyond. A string of five parachutes writhed away before the wind.
So that’s what they look like, she thought. It seemed so small to have come so far…but it must be only a tiny portion of the total ramrobot. The major portion would be on its way home.
But it was the package that counted. The contents of a ramrobot package were never trivial. For six months, ever since the maser message arrived, the Sons of Earth had been planning to capture ramrobot capsule #143. At worst, they could ransom it to the crew. At best, it might be something to fight with.
She almost stepped out of the woods before she saw the cars. At least thirty of them, landing all around the ramrobot package.
She stayed hidden.
His soldiers would not have recognized Jesus Pietro, but they would have understood. All but two or three of the men and women around him were purebred crew. Their chauffeurs, including his own, had prudently stayed in their cars. Jesus Pietro Castro was obsequious, deferential, and very careful not to joggle an elbow or to step on a toe or even to find himself in somebody’s path.
As a result, his vision was blocked when Millard Parlette, a real descendant of the first Captain of the Planck, opened the capsule and reached in. He did see what the ancient held up to the sunlight, the better to examine it.
It was a rectangular solid with rounded edges, and it had been packed in a resilient material which was now disintegrating. The bottom half was metal. The top was a remote descendant of glass, hard as the cheaper steel alloys, more transparent than a windowpane. And in the top half floated something shapeless.
Jesus Pietro felt his mouth fall open. He looked harder. His eyelids squinted, his pupils dilated. Yes, he knew what this was. It was what the maser message had promised six months ago.
A great gift, and a great danger.
“This must be our most carefully guarded secret,” Millard Parlette was saying in a voice like a squeaky door. “No word must ever leak out. If the colonists saw this, they’d blow it out of all proportion. We’ll have to tell Castro to—Castro! Where the Mist Demons is Castro?”
“Here I am, sir.”
Polly fitted the camera back in its case and began to work her way deeper into the woods. She’d taken several pictures, and two were telescopic shots of the thing in the glass case. Her eyes hadn’t seen it clearly, but the film would show it in detail.
She went up a tree with the camera about her neck. The leaves and branches tried to push her back, but she fought through, deeper and deeper into the protecting leaves. When she stopped, there was hardly a square inch of her that didn’t feel the gentle pressure. It was dark as the caves of Pluto.
In a few minutes the police would be all through here. They would wait only until the crew was gone before converging on this area. It was not enough that Polly be invisible. There must be enough leaves to block any infrared fight leaving her body.
She could hardly blame herself for losing the capsule. The Sons of Earth had been unable to translate the maser message, but the crew had. They knew the capsule’s worth. But so did Polly—now. When the eighteen thousand colonists of Mount Lookitthat knew what was in that capsule…
Night came. The Implementation police had collected all the colonists they could find. None had seen the capsule after it came down, and all would be released after questioning. Now the police spread out with infrared detectors. There were several spots of random heat in Polly’s grove, and all were sprayed with sonic stunners. Polly never knew she’d been hit. When she woke next morning, she was relie
ved to find herself still in her perch. She waited until high noon, then moved toward the Beta-Gamma Bridge with her camera hidden under the mushrooms.
The Sons of Earth
IIFrom the bell tower of Campbelltown came four thunderous ringing notes. The sonic wave-fronts marched out of town in order, crossing fields and roads, diminishing as they came. They overran the mine with hardly a pause. But men looked up, lowering their tools.
Matt smiled for the first time that day. Already he could taste cold beer.
The bicycle ride from the mine was all downhill. He reached Cziller’s as the place was beginning to fill up. He ordered a pitcher, as usual, and downed the first glassful without drawing breath. A kind of bliss settled on him, and he poured his second glass carefully down the side to avoid a head. He sat sipping it while more and more freed workmen poured into the taproom.
Tomorrow was Saturday. For two days and three nights he could forget the undependable little beasties who earned him his living.
Presently an elbow hit him in the neck. He ignored it: a habit his ancestors had brought from crowded Earth and retained. But the second time the elbow poked him, he had the glass to his lips. With beer dripping wetly down his neck, be turned to deliver a mild reproof.
“Sorry,” said a short dark man with straight black hair. He had a thin, expressionless face and the air of a tired clerk. Matt looked more closely.
“Hood,” he said.
“Yes, my name is Hood. But I don’t recognize you.” The man put a question in his voice.
Matt grinned, for he liked flamboyant gestures. He wrapped his fingers in his collar and pulled his shirt open to the waist. “Try again,” he invited.
The clerkish type shied back, and then his eyes caught the tiny scar on Matt’s chest. “Keller.”
“Right,” said Matt, and zipped his shirt up.
“Keller. I’ll be d—damned,” said Hood. You could tell somehow that he saved such words for emergencies. “It’s been at least seven years. What have you been doing lately?”