Galactic empires 1, p.4
Galactic Empires 1, page 4
Otis was silent most of the flight back to headquarters. Once there, he disappeared with a perfunctory excuse toward the rooms assigned him.
That evening, at a dinner which Finchley had made as attractive as was possible in a comparatively raw and new colony, Otis was noticeably sociable. The co-ordinator was gratified.
‘Looks as if they finally sent us a regular guy,’ he remarked behind his hand to one of his assistants. ‘Round up a couple of the prettier secretaries to keep him happy.’
‘I understand he nearly laid hands on a Torang up at the diggings,’ said the other.
‘Yep, ran right at it bare-handed. Came as close bagging it as anybody could, I suppose.’
‘Maybe it’s just as well he didn’t,’ commented the assistant ‘They’re big enough to mess up an unarmed man some.’
Otis, meanwhile and for the rest of the evening, was assiduously busy making acquaintances. So engrossed was he in turning every new conversation to the Torangs and asking seemingly casual questions about the little known of their habits and possible past, that he hardly noticed receiving any special attentions. As a visiting inspector, he was used to attempts to entertain and distract him.
The next morning, he caught Finchley at his office in the sprawling one-story structure of concrete and glass that was colonial headquarters.
After accepting a chair across the desk from the co-ordinator, Otis told him his conclusions. Finchley’s narrow eyes opened a trifle when he heard the details. His wide, hard-musded face became slightly pink.
‘Oh, for—!’ mean, Otis, why must you make something big out of it? The men very seldom bag one anyway!’
‘Perhaps because they’re so rare,’ answered Otis calmly. ‘How do we know they’re not intelligent life? Maybe if you were hanging on in the ruins of your ancestors’ civilization, reduced to a primitive state, you’d be just as wary of a bunch of loud Terrans moving in!’
Finchley shrugged. He looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if debating whether Otis or some disgruntled sportsman from his husky construction crews would be easier to handle.
“Think of the overall picture a minute,’ Otis urged. “We’re pushing out into space at last, after centuries of dreams and struggles. With all the misery we’ve seen in various colonial systems at home, we’ve tried to plan these ventures so as to avoid old mistakes.’
Finchley nodded grudgingly. Otis could see that his mind was on the progress charts of his many projects.
‘It stands to reason,’ the inspector went on, ‘that some day well find a planet with intelligent life. We’re still new in space, but as we probe farther out, it’s bound to happen. That’s why the Commission drew up rules about native life forms. Or have you read that part of the code lately?”
Finchley shifted from side to side in his chair.
‘Now, look!’ he protested. ‘Don’t go making me out a hard-boiled vandal with nothing in mind but exterminating everything that moves on all Torang. I don’t go out hunting the apes!’
‘I know, I know,’ Otis soothed him. ‘But before the Colonial Commission will sanction any destruction of indigenous life, we’ll have to show—besides that it’s not intelligent—that it exists in sufficient numbers to avoid extinction.’
‘What do you expect me to do about it?’
Otis regarded him with some sympathy. Finchley was the hard-bitten type the Commission needed to oversee the first breaking-in of a colony on a strange planet, but he was not un-reasonable. He merely wanted to be left alone to handle the tough job facing him.
‘Announce a ban on hunting Torangs,’ Otis said. ‘There must be something else they can go after.’
‘Oh, yes,’ admitted Finchley. There are swarms of little rabbit-things and other vermin running through the brush. But, I don’t know—’
‘It’s standard practice,’ Otis reminded him. ‘We have many a protected species even back on Terra that would be extinct by now, but for the game laws.’
In the end, they agreed that Finchley would do his honest best to enforce a ban provided Otis obtained a formal order from the headquarters of the system. The inspector went from the office straight to the communications center, where he filed a long report for the chief co-ordinator’s office in the other part of the binary system.
It took some hours for the reply to reach Torang. When it came that afternoon, he went looking for Finchley.
He found the co-ordinator inspecting a newly finished canning factory on the coast, elated at the completion of one more link in making the colony self-sustaining.
‘Here it is,’ said Otis, waving the message copy. ‘Signed by the chief himself. “As of this date, the apelike beings known as Torangs, indigenous to planet number and so forth, are to be considered a rare and protected species under regulations and so forth et cetera.”’
‘Good enough,’ answered Finchley with an amiable shrug. ‘Give it here, and I’ll have it put on the public address system and the bulletin boards.’
Otis returned satisfied to the helicopter that had brought him out from headquarters.
‘Back, sir?’ asked the pilot.
‘Yes… no! Just for fun, take me out to the old city. I never did get a good look the other day, and I’d like to before I leave.’
They flew over the plains between the sea and the upjutting cliffs. In the distance, Otis caught a glimpse of the rising dam he had been shown the day before. This colony would go well, he reflected, as long as he checked up on details like preserving native life forms.
Eventually, the pilot landed at the same spot he had been taken on his previous visit to the ancient ruins. Someone else was on the scene today. Otis saw a pair of men he took to be archaeologists.
‘I’ll just wander around a bit,’ he told the pilot.
He noticed the two men looking at him from where they stood by the shovels and other equipment, so he paused to say hello. As he thought, they had been digging in the ruins.
‘Taking some measurements in fact,’ said the sunburned blond introduced as Hoffman. ‘Trying to get a line on what sort of things built the place.’
‘Oh?’ said Otis, interested. ‘What’s the latest theory?’
‘Not so much different from us,’ Hoffman told the inspector while his partner left them to pick up another load of artifacts.
‘Judging from the size of the rooms, height of doorways, and such stuff as stairways,’ he went on, ‘they were pretty much our size. So far, of course, it’s only a rough estimate.’
‘Could be ancestors of the Torangs, eh?’ asked Otis.
“Very possible, sir,’ answered Hoffman, with a promptness that suggested it was his own view. ‘But we haven’t dug up enough to guess at the type of culture they had, or draw any conclusions as to their psychology or social customs.’
Otis nodded, thinking that he ought to mention the young fellow’s name to Finchley before he left Torang. He excused himself as the other man returned with a box of some sort of scraps the pair had unearthed, and strolled between the outlines of the untouched buildings.
In a few minutes, he came to the section of higher structures where he had encountered the Torang the previous day.
‘Wonder if I should look in the same spot?” he muttered aloud. ‘No… that would be the last place the thing would return to… unless it had a lair thereabouts—
He stopped to get his bearings, then shrugged and walked around a mound of rubble toward what he believed to be the proper building.
Pretty sure this was it, he mused. Yes, shadows around that window arch look the same… same time of day—
He halted, almost guiltily, and looked back to make sure no one was observing his return to the scene of his little adventure. After all, an inspector of colonial installations was not supposed to run around ghost-hunting like a small boy.
Finding himself alone, he stepped briskly through the crumbling arch—and froze in his tracks.
‘I am honored to know you,’ said the Torang in a mild, rather buzzing voice. ‘We thought you possibly would return here.’
Otis gaped. The black eyes projecting from the sides of the narrow head tracked him up and down, giving him the unpleasant sensation of being measured for an artillery salvo.
‘I am known as Jal-Ganyr,’ said the Torang. ‘Unless I am given incorrect data, you are known as Jeff-Otis. That is so.’
The last statement was made with almost no inflection, but some still-functioning corner of Otis’ mind interpreted it as a question. He sucked in a deep breath, suddenly conscious of having forgotten to breathe for a moment
‘I didn’t know… yes, that is so… I didn’t know you Torangs could speak Terran. Or anything else. How—?’
He hesitated as a million questions boiled up in his mind to be asked. Jal-Ganyr absently stroked the gray fur of his chest with his three-fingered left hand, squatting patiently on a flat rock. Otis felt somehow that he had been allowed to waste time mumbling only by grace of disciplined politeness.
‘I am not of the Torangs,’ said Jal-Ganyr in his wheezing voice. ‘I am of the Myrbs. You would possibly say Myrbii. I have not been informed.’
‘You mean that is your name for yourselves?’ asked Otis.
Jal-Ganyr seemed to consider, his mobile eyes swiveling inward to scan the Terran’s face.
‘More than that,’ he said at last, when he had thought it over. ‘I mean I am of the race originating at Myrb, not of this planet.’
‘Before we go any further,’ insisted Otis, ‘tell me, at least, how you learned our language!’
Jal-Ganyr made a fleeting gesture. His ‘face’ was unreadable to the Terran, but Otis had the impression he had received the equivalent of a smile and a shrug.
‘As to that,’ said the Myrb, ‘I possibly learned it before you did. We have observed you a very long time. You would unbelieve how long.’
‘But then—’ Otis paused. That must mean before the colonists had landed on this planet. He was half-afraid it might mean before they had reached this sun system. He put aside the thought and asked, ‘But then, why do you live like this among the ruins? Why wait till now? If you had communicated, you could have had our help rebuilding—’
He let his voice trail off, wondering what sounded wrong. Jal-Ganyr rolled his eyes about leisurely, as if disdaining the surrounding ruins. Again, he seemed to consider all the implications of Otis’ questions.
‘We picked up your message to your chief,’ he answered at last. ‘We decided time is to communicate with one of you.
‘We have no interest in rebuilding,’ he added. ‘We have concealed quarters for ourselves.’
Otis found that his lips were dry from his unconsciously having let his mouth hang open. He moistened them with the tip of his tongue, and relaxed enough to lean against the wall.
‘You mean my getting the ruling to proclaim you a protected species?’ he asked. ‘You have instruments to intercept such signals?’
‘I do. We have,’ said Jal-Ganyr simply. It has been decided that you have expanded far enough into space to make necessary we contact a few of the thoughtful among you. It will possibly make easier in the future for our observers.’
Otis wondered how much of that was irony. He felt himself flushing at the memory of the ‘stuffed specimen’ at headquarters, and was peculiarly relieved that he had not gone to see it.
I’ve had the luck, he told himself. I’m the one to discover the first known intelligent beings beyond Sol!
Aloud, he said, ‘We expected to meet someone like you eventually. But why have you chosen me?”
The question sounded vain, he realized, but it brought unexpected results.
‘Your message. You made in a little way the same decision we made in a big way. We deduce that you are one to understand our regret and shame at what happened between our races… long ago.’
‘Between—?’
‘Yes. For a long time, we thought you were all gone. We are pleased to see you returning to some of your old planets.’
Otis stared blankly. Some instinct must have enabled the Myrb to interpret his bewildered expression. He apologized briefly.
‘I possibly forgot to explain the ruins.’ Again, Jal-Ganyr’s eyes swiveled slowly about.
“They are not ours,’ he said mildly. ‘They are yours.’
There is one circumstance under which it is exceedingly difficult to establish communications with another individual—or race. A new author considers a point that could make technically adequate communications quite futile…
ALL THE WAY BACK
by Michael Shaara
Great were the Antha, so reads the One Book of history, greater perhaps than any of the Galactic Peoples, and they were brilliant and fair, and their reign was long, and in all things they were great and proud, even in the manner of their dying—
Preface to Loab: History of The Master Race.
The huge red ball of a sun hung glowing upon the screen.
Jansen adjusted the traversing knob, his face tensed and weary. The sun swung off the screen to the right, was replaced by the live black of space and the million speckled lights of the farther stars. A moment later the sun glided silently back across the screen and went off at the left. Again there was nothing but space and the stars.
‘Try it again?’ Cohn asked.
Jansen mumbled: ‘No. No use,’ and he swore heavily. ‘Nothing. Always nothing. Never a blessed thing.’
Cohn repressed a sigh, began to adjust the controls.
In both of their minds was the single, bitter thought that there would be only one more time, and then they would go home. And it was a long way to come to go home with nothing.
When the controls were set there was nothing left to do. The two men walked slowly aft to the freeze room. Climbing up painfully on to the flat steel of the beds, they lay back and waited for the mechanism to function, for the freeze to begin.
Turned in her course, the spaceship bore off into the open emptiness. Her ports were thrown open, she was gathering speed as she moved away from the huge red star.
The object was sighted upon the last leg of the patrol, as the huge ship of the Galactic Scouts came across the edge of the Great Desert of the Rim, swinging wide in a long slow curve. It was there on the massometer as a faint blip, and, of course, the word went directly to Roymer.
‘Report,’ he said briefly, and Lieutenant Goladan—a young and somewhat pompous Higiandrian—gave the Higiandrian equivalent of a cough and then reported.
‘Observe,’ said Lieutenant Goladan, ‘that it is not a meteor, for the speed of it is much too great’
Roymer nodded patiently.
‘And again, the speed is decreasing’—Goladan consulted his figures—‘at the rate of twenty-four dines per segment. Since the orbit appears to bear directly upon the star Mina, and the decrease in speed is of a certain arbitrary origin, we must conclude that the object is a spaceship.’
Roymer smiled.
‘Very good, lieutenant.’ Like a tiny nova, Goladan began to glow and expand.
A good man, thought Roymer tolerantly, his is a race of good men. They have been two million years in achieving space flight; a certain adolescence is to be expected.
‘Would you call Mind-Search, please?’ Roymer asked.
Goladan sped away, to return almost immediately with the heavy-headed non-human Trian, chief of the Mind-Search Section.
Trian cocked an eyelike thing at Roymer, with grave inquiry.
‘Yes, commander?’
The abrupt change in course was noticeable only on the viewplate, as the stars slid silently by. The patrol vessel veered off, swinging around and into the desert, settled into a parallel course with the strange new craft, keeping a discreet distance of—approximately—a light-year.
The scanners brought the object into immediate focus, and Goladan grinned with pleasure. A spaceship, yes. Alien, too. Undoubtedly a primitive race. He voiced these thoughts to Roymer.
‘Yes,’ the commander said, staring at the strange, small, projectilelike craft. ‘Primitive type. It is to be wondered what they are doing in the desert.’
Goladan assumed an expression of intense curiosity.
‘Trian,’ said Roymer pleasantly, ‘would you contact?’
The huge head bobbed up and down once and then stared into the screen. There was a moment of profound silence. Then Trian turned back to stare at Roymer, and there was a distinctly human expression of surprise in his eyelike things.
‘Nothing,’ came the thought. ‘I can detect no presence at all.’
Roymer raised an eyebrow.
Is there a barrier?’
‘No’—Trian had turned to gaze back into the screen—‘a barrier I could detect. But there is nothing at all. There is no sentient activity on board that vessel.’
Trian’s word had to be taken, of course, and Roymer was disappointed. A spaceship empty of life—Roymer shrugged. A derelict, then. But why the decreasing speed? Pre-set controls would account for that, of course, but why? Certainly, if one abandoned a ship, one would not arrange for it to—
He was interrupted by Trian’s thought:
‘Excuse me, but there is nothing. May I return to my quarters?’
Roymer nodded and thanked him, and Trian went ponderously away. Goladan said:
‘Shall we prepare to board it, sir?’
‘Yes.’
And then Goladan was gone to give his proud orders.
Roymer continued to stare at the primitive vessel which hung on the plate. Curious. It was very interesting, always, to come upon derelict ships. The stories that were old, the silent tombs that had been drifting perhaps, for millions of years in the deep sea of space. In the beginning Roymer had hoped that the ship would be manned, and alien, but—nowadays, contact with an isolated race was rare, extremely rare. It was not to be hoped for, and he would be content with this, this undoubtedly empty, ancient ship.
And then, to Roymer’s complete surprise, the ship at which he was staring shifted abruptly, turned on its axis, and flashed off like a live thing upon a new course.
