It was a long, grim retreat to the ship.
* * * *
They were still a quarter of a million miles from Fasolt when Radioman Klaristenfeld reported that Captain Fourteen Deathless of the Rigelian ship was calling.
“We see you have left also,” the Rigelian said when Harskin took the phone. “You were evidently as unsuccessful as we.”
“Not quite,” Harskin said. “At least we got out of there without any casualties. I counted six dead Rigelians outside that village—plus the man you left behind to watch over us. He’s in our brig.”
“Ah. I had wondered what became of him. Well, Harskin, do we declare Fafnir a neutral planet and leave it at that? It’s a rather unsatisfactory finish to our little encounter.”
“Agreed. But what can we do? We dumped nearly fifty thousand credits’ worth of trinkets when we escaped.”
“You Terrans are lavish,” the Rigelian observed. “Our goods were worth but half that.”
“That’s the way it goes,” Harskin said. “Well, best wishes, Fourteen Deathless.”
“One moment! Is the decision a dual withdrawal?”
“I’m not so sure,” Harskin said, and broke the contact.
When they reached Fasolt and rejoined the men in the dome, Harskin ordered a general meeting. He had an idea.
“The aliens,” he said, “offered the gnorphs twenty-five thousand credits of goods, and were repulsed angrily. We offered twice as much—and, if Archer’s account of the Rigelian incident was accurate, we were repulsed about twice as fast. Yang, does that suggest anything to you?”
The little sociologist wrinkled his head. “The pattern still is not clear,” he said.
“I didn’t think so.” Harskin knotted his fingers in concentration. “Let me put it this way: the degree of insult the gnorphs felt was in direct variance with the degree of wealth offered. That sound plausible?”
Yang nodded.
“Tell me: what happens when an isolated, biologically glum race is visited by warm-blooded aliens from the skies? Suppose those warm-blooded aliens want a treaty of friendship—and offer to pay for it? How will the natives react, Yang?”
“I see. They’ll get highly insulted. We’re treating them in a cavalier fashion.”
“More than that. We’re obliging them to us. We’re purchasing that treaty with our gifts. But obviously gifts are worth more than a treaty of friendship, so they feel they’ll still owe us something if they accept. They don’t want to owe us anything. So they chase us away.
“Now,” continued Harskin, “if we reverse the situation—if we make ourselves beholden to them, and beg for the signing of the treaty instead of trying to buy a treaty—why, that gives them a chance to seem lordly.” He turned to Ramos, the military attaché. “Ramos, do you think a solar system is worth a spaceship?”
“Eh?”
“I mean, if it becomes necessary to sacrifice our ship in order to win the Antares system, will that be a strategically sound move?”
“I imagine so,” Ramos said cautiously.
Harskin flicked a bead of sweat from his forehead. “Very well, then. Mawley, you and I and Navigator Dominic are going to take the Peccable on her final cruise. Klaristenfeld, I want you to get a subradio sending set inside my spacesuit, and make damned sure you don’t put it where it’ll bother me. Snollgren, you monitor the area and keep me posted on what the Rigelians are doing, if anything.”
He pointed to the Navigator. “Come up to Control Cabin, Dominic. We’re going to work out the most precise orbit you’ll ever need to compute.”
* * * *
Antares was sinking in the sky and the blue sun was in partial eclipse. Suddenly, the Peccable flashed across the sky of Fafnir, trailing smoke at both jets, roaring like a wounded giant as it circled in wildly for its crash landing.
The three men aboard were huddled in their acceleration cradles, groaning in pain as the increasing grav buffeted and bruised them. Below, Fafnir sprang up to meet the ship.
Harskin was bathed in his own sweat. So many things could go wrong…
They might have computed one tenth-place decimal awry—and would land square in the heart of the swampland.
The stabilizer jets might be consumed by the blaze they had set too soon, and the impact of their landing would kill them.
The airlock might refuse to open.
The gnorphs might fail to act as expected…
It was, he thought, an insane venture.
The ship throbbed suddenly as the stabilizer jets went into action. The Peccable froze for a fraction of a second, then began to glide.
It struck the blood-red ocean nose first. Furiously, Harskin climbed from his cradle and into his spacesuit. Now, if we only figured the buoyancy factor right…
Two spacesuited figures waited for him at the airlock. He grinned at them, threw open the hatch, and stepped into the outer chamber. The door opened; a wall of water rushed at him. He squirted out of the sinking ship and popped to the surface like a cork. A moment later he saw Mawley and Dominic come bobbing above the water nearby.
He turned. All that was visible of the Peccable was the rear jet assembly and the tips of the once-proud wings. An oily slick was starting to cover the bright-red water. The ship was sinking rapidly as water poured into the lock.
“Look over there!” Mawley exclaimed.
Harskin looked. Something that looked like a small island with a neck was approaching him: a monstrous turtle-like thing with a thick, saurian neck and a crested unintelligent head, from which dangled seven or eight fleshy barbels.
And riding in a sort of howdah erected on the broad carapace were three gnorphs, peering curiously at the three spacesuited men bobbing in the water.
The rescue party was on time.
“Help!” cried Harskin. “Rescue us! Oh, I beg of you, rescue us, and we’ll be eternally obliged to you! Rescue us!”
He hoped the converter was translating the words with a suitable inflection of piteous despair.
DOUBLEPLUS PRIORITY 03-16-2952 ABS XPF32 EXP FORCE ANTARES SYSTEM TO HIGH COMMAND TERRA:
BE ADVISED ANTARES SYSTEM IN TERRAN FOLD. RIGELIANS ON HAND HAVE VALIDATED OUR TREATY WITH INHABITANTS OF FAFNIR, ANTARES’ ONE WORLD. ALL IS WELL AND NO CASUALTIES EXCEPT SHIP PECCABLE ACCIDENTALLY DESTROYED. FIFTEEN MEMBERS OF CREW LIVING IN DOME ON COMPANION WORLD FASOLT, THREE OF US LIVING ON FAFNIR. PLEASE SEND PICKUP SHIP DOUBLE FAST AS WE ARE CURRENTLY IN MENIAL SERVITUDE.
ALL THE BEST, LOVE AND KISSES, ETC.
Harskin
OZYMANDIAS
Originally published in Infinity Science Fiction, November 1958.
The planet had been dead about a million years. That was our first impression, as our ship orbited down to its sere brown surface, and as it happened our first impression turned out to be right. There had been a civilization here once—but Earth had swung around Sol ten-to-the-sixth times since the last living being of this world had drawn breath.
“A dead planet,” Colonel Mattern exclaimed bitterly. “Nothing here that’s of any use. We might as well pack up and move on.”
It was hardly surprising that Mattern would feel that way. In urging a quick departure and an immediate removal to some world of greater utilitarian value, Mattern was, after all, only serving the best interests of his employers. His employers were the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. They expected Mattern and his half of the crew to produce results, and by way of results they meant new weapons and military alliances. They hadn’t tossed in 70 percent of the budget for this trip just to sponsor a lot of archaeological putterings.
But lucky for our half of the outfit—the archaeological putterers’ half—Mattern did not have an absolute voice in the affairs of the outfit. Perhaps the General S
taff had kicked in for 70 percent of our budget, but the cautious men of the military’s Public Liaison branch had seen to it that we had at least some rights.
Dr. Leopold, head of the non-military segment of the expedition, said brusquely, “Sorry, Mattern, but I’ll have to apply the limiting clause here.”
Mattern started to sputter. “But—”
“But nothing, Mattern. We’re here. We’ve spent a good chunk of American cash in getting here. I insist that we spend the minimum time allotted for scientific research, as long as we are here.”
Mattern scowled, looking down at the table, supporting his chin on his thumbs and digging the rest of his fingers in hard back of his jawbone. He was annoyed, but he was smart enough to know he didn’t have much of a case to make against Leopold.
The rest of us—four archaeologists and seven military men; they outnumbered us a trifle—watched eagerly as our superiors battled. My eyes strayed through the porthole and I looked at the dry windblown plain, marked here and there with the stumps of what might have been massive monuments millennia ago.
Mattern said bleakly, “The world is of utterly no strategic consequence. Why, it’s so old that even the vestiges of civilization have turned to dust!”
“Nevertheless, I reserve the right granted to me to explore any world we land on, for a period of at least one hundred sixty-eight hours,” Leopold returned implacably.
Exasperated, Mattern burst out, “Dammit, why? Just to spite me? Just to prove the innate intellectual superiority of the scientist to the man of war?”
“Mattern, I’m not injecting personalities into this.”
“I’d like to know what you are doing, then? Here we are on a world that’s obviously useless to me and probably just as useless to you. Yet you stick me on a technicality and force me to waste a week here. Why, if not out of spite?”
“We’ve made only the most superficial reconnaissance so far,” Leopold, said. “For all we know this place may be the answer to many questions of galactic history. It may even be a treasure-trove of superbombs, for all—”
“Pretty damned likely!” Mattern exploded. He glared around the conference room, fixing each of the scientific members of the committee with a baleful stare. He was making it quite clear that he was trapped into a wasteful expense of time by our foggy-eyed desire for Knowledge.
Useless knowledge. Not good hard practical knowledge of the kind he valued.
“All right,” he said finally. “I’ve protested and I’ve lost, Leopold. You’re within your rights in insisting on remaining here one week. But you’d damned well better be ready to blast off when your time’s up!”
It had been foregone all along, of course. The charter of our expedition was explicit on the matter. We had been sent out to comb a stretch of worlds near the Galactic Rim that had already been brushed over hastily by a survey mission.
The surveyors had been looking simply for signs of life, and, finding none, they had moved on. We were entrusted with the task of investigating in detail. Some of the planets in the group had been inhabited once, the surveyors had reported. None bore present life.
Our job was to comb through the assigned worlds with diligence. Leopold, leading our group, had the task of doing pure archaeological research on the dead civilizations; Mattern and his men had the more immediately practical job of looking for fissionable material, leftover alien weapons, possible sources of lithium or tritium for fusion, and other such militarily useful things. You could argue that in a strictly pragmatic sense our segment of the group was just dead weight, carted along for the ride at great expense, and you would be right.
But the public temper over the last few hundred years in America had frowned on purely military expeditions. And so, as a sop to the nation’s conscience, five archaeologists, of little empirical consequence so far as national security mattered, were tacked onto the expedition.
Us.
Mattern made it quite clear at the outset that his boys were the Really Important members of the expedition, and that we were simply ballast. In a way, we had to agree. Tension was mounting once again on our sadly disunited planet; there was no telling when the Other Hemisphere would rouse from its quiescence of a hundred years and decide to plunge once more into space. If anything of military value lay out here, we knew we had to find it before They did.
The good old armaments race. Hi-ho! The old space stories used to talk about expeditions from Earth. Well, we were from Earth, abstractly speaking—but in actuality we were from America, period. Global unity was as much of a pipedream as it had been three hundred years earlier, in the remote and primitive chemical-rocket era of space travel. Amen. End of sermon. We got to work.
* * * *
The planet had no name, and we didn’t give it one; a special commission of what was laughably termed the United Nations Organization was working on the problem of assigning names to the hundreds of worlds of the galaxy, using the old idea of borrowing from ancient Terran mythologies in analogy to the Mercury-Venus-Mars nomenclature of our own system.
Probably they would end up saddling this world with something like Thoth or Bel-Marduk or perhaps Avalokitesvara. We knew it simply as Planet Four of the system belonging to a yellow-white FS IV Procyonoid sun, Revised HD Catalogue # 170861.
It was roughly Earthtype, with a diameter of 6100 miles, a gravity index of .93, a mean temperature of 45 degrees F. with a daily fluctuation range of about ten degrees, and a thin, nasty atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide with wisps of helium and hydrogen and the barest smidgeon of oxygen. Quite possibly the air had been breathable by humanoid life millions of years ago—but that was millions of years ago. We took good care to practice our breathing-mask drills before we ventured out of the ship.
The sun, as noted, was an FS IV and fairly hot, but Planet Four was a hundred eighty-five million miles away from it at perihelion, and a good deal further when it was at the other swing of its rather eccentric orbit; the good old Keplerian ellipse took quite a bit of punishment in this system. Planet Four reminded me in many ways of Mars—except that Mars, of course, had never known intelligent life of any kind, at least none that had troubled to leave a hint of its existence, while this planet had obviously had a flourishing civilization at a time when Pithecanthropus was Earth’s noblest being.
In any event, once we had thrashed out the matter of whether or not we were going to stay here or pull up and head for the next planet on our schedule, the five of us set to work. We knew we had only a week—Mattern would never grant us an extension unless we came up with something good enough to change his mind, which was improbable—and we wanted to get as much done in that week as possible. With the sky as full of worlds as it is, this planet might never be visited by Earth scientists again.
Mattern and his men served notice right away that they were going to help us, but reluctantly and minimally. We unlimbered the three small halftracks carried aboard ship and got them into functioning order. We stowed our gear—cameras, picks and shovels, camel’s-hair brushes—and donned our breathing-masks, and Mattern’s men helped us get the halftracks out of the ship and pointed in the right direction.
Then they stood back and waited for us to shove off.
“Don’t any of you plan to accompany us?” Leopold asked. The halftracks each held up to four men.
Mattern shook his head. “You fellows go out by yourselves today and let us know what you find. We can make better use of the time filing and catching up on back log entries.”
I saw Leopold start to scowl. Mattern was being openly contemptuous; the least he could do was have his men make a token search for fissionable or fusionable matter! But Leopold swallowed down his anger.
“Okay,” he said. “You do that. If we come across any raw veins of plutonium I’ll radio back.”
“Sure,” Mattern said. “
Thanks for the favor. Let me know if you find a brass mine, too.” He laughed harshly. “Raw plutonium! I half believe you’re serious!”
* * * *
We had worked out a rough sketch of the area, and we split up into three units. Leopold, alone, headed straight due west, towards the dry riverbed we had spotted from the air. He intended to check alluvial deposits, I guess.
Marshall and Webster, sharing one halftrack, struck out to the hilly country southeast of our landing point. A substantial city appeared to be buried under the sand there. Gerhardt and I, in the other vehicle, made off to the north, where we hoped to find remnants of yet another city. It was a bleak, windy day; the endless sand that covered this world mounted into little dunes before us, and the wind picked up handfuls and tossed it against the plastic dome that covered our truck. Underneath the steel cleats of our tractor-belt, there was a steady crunch-crunch of metal coming down on sand that hadn’t been disturbed in millennia.
Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Gerhardt said, “I hope the ship’s still there when we get back to the base.”
Frowning, I turned to look at him as I drove. Gerhardt had always been an enigma: a small scrunchy guy with untidy brown hair flapping in his eyes, eyes that were set a little too close together. He had a degree from the University of Kansas and had put in some time on their field staff with distinction, or so his references said.
I said, “What the hell do you mean?”
“I don’t trust Mattern. He hates us.”
“He doesn’t. Mattern’s no villain—just a fellow who wants to do his job and go home. But what do you mean, the ship not being there?”
“He’ll blast off without us. You see the way he sent us all out into the desert and kept his own men back. I tell you, he’ll strand us here!”
I snorted. “Don’t be a paranoid. Mattern won’t do anything of the sort.”