The compleat collected s.., p.34
The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 34
Naleen blew up.
She began by telling him that she was a freak, and that he only wanted to drag her around as a sort of pet animal. Dr. Munsen had told her that the skin markings would never quite disappear in her, or the grel gland system connected with them though the Shots would neutralize it. He was abnormal for wanting to marry a freak like her. People would laugh at her wherever she went with him, and he'd be laughing at her, too. He was a sadist, she accused, an ego-maniac. She hated him, his Team, and all the Earthmen there ever were—but mostly him. She didn't have enough of his words to tell him how much she hated him, but she was going to try ...
Rolston replied harshly that she didn't know what she was talking about, and she'd no business trying to analyse him with the few scraps of elementary psychology that the Educators had taught her. Dr. Munsen had been angry because she was the cause of his having to stay here, and this must have made him tactless and caused some misunderstanding.
But his replies didn't satisfy Naleen. Her accusations became wilder and more hysterical, and his answers to them grew angrier and more contemptuous.
The whole thing was merely a last outburst—a final release of mental pressure—before her final surrender. He should have realised that and let her blow off steam. But instead he went on making scathingly logical answers to accusations that Naleen knew herself to be silly. He should have held on, but he was every bit as impatient as Dr. Munsen to get away from Kallec, and the heat and sheer frustration made his nerves like taut wires. He needed the momentary luxury of losing his temper just a little bit, his tightly-knotted nervous system demanded it.
But when he lost his temper, he lost it all.
Hazily, he knew that he had sunk his fingers into her shoulders, and shaken her until her teeth clicked together and her glorious white hair fell all over her face. He had heard his own voice shouting that he was going to shake some sense into her, but there was an unreal, dreamlike quality to it. It couldn't have been his voice, he couldn't bring himself to hurt Naleen in any way. Not Naleen. But the passion-thickened voice and the vice-like fingers were his all right, and he was suddenly shocked back into reality when Naleen twisted free and ran away crying.
Desperately Rolston began running after her, for he knew what she might do.
He caught her, almost, at the exit port—the seal nearly closed on his fingers. Then she was through, and a viewer over the port showed her running madly over the burning ground away from the Dome.
With desperate haste Rolston struggled into a heat-suit, keeping his eyes on the wavering, heat-distorted image of Naleen that grew steadily smaller in the view-screen. It was early Summer; unprotected he wouldn't last two minutes in the hell outside the Dome. When he got out at last she was a hundred yards away. In an agony of guilt and sorrow he called her back. She kept on going. He tried to follow her, but the cumbersome suit held him back. She drew steadily away, and he saw her climb the hillside that they'd come to know so well, the pitiless glare of that blast-furnace sun making her hair and tunic a blob of brilliant light against the blackened ground surface. Near the summit he saw her slow, stagger, and collapse.
When he reached her ten minutes later she was lying curled up in a foetal position, and the things the heat was doing to her made him gag. He couldn't bear to lift her, or touch her even. She was slowly ... bubbling, and changing colour. Great globules of sticky white stuff were forming on her skin, bursting, and spreading—faster and faster. He tried to shade her with his body, but he knew it was hopeless from the start. He forced his eyes to look at the thing that had been Naleen, and slowly, monotonously, he cursed the sun.
He was still crouching over her when the Team psychologist and two Kallecians came out to take him back. The natives were also in heat-suits—the Standardisation Shots having neutralised their grel function, they needed them now as much as the Earthmen—and were being sympathetic and philosophical about Rolston's loss in voices that were too highly amplified. Naleen, they told him solemnly, was great, highly-respected, and unusual ... or words to that effect. Her parents also had been great and had lived through many Summers, very many Summers. The natives kept talking about how great and unusual Naleen and her parents were until Rolston felt like smashing their kindly, reassuring skulls together.
An hour after they returned to the Dome, a native spokesman informed the Team that, because of what had happened to Naleen, nobody was going to leave Kallec until the end of the present Summer.
ALL THAT had been twenty months ago. Rolston thought as he gave the shiny white rock on the scorched hillside a final look before he began retracing his steps to the Dome, and the pain and anxiety, the sheer frustration and the awful, maddening uncertainty was as bad today as it had been then. Worse even. The natives hadn't blamed him, he knew, they understood and left him alone. Dr. Munsen, though he still must have felt a burning impatience at being forced to remain on Kallec with nothing much to do, neither talked about it nor showed it in any way; he, too, understood. But the Team psychologist on the other hand, showed deep professional concern over Rolston's condition, and had hinted several times that he'd like to do something about it. But while he had drugs and techniques at his disposal that could wipe the whole Naleen incident from Rolston's memory and make him normally well-adjusted again, the same code of ethics that forbade the Medic administering the Shots to Naleen against the girl's will kept him from using his wonderfully efficient curative methods until he was requested to do so.
Rolston therefore, continued his daily walks. Slowly as Kallec climbed towards aphelion along its eccentric, near-cometary orbit, Summer merged into Autumn. The Night Rain which converted the outside of the Dome into a world of boiling mud and super-heated steam began to collect in cracks and gullies, and remain as a liquid for longer periods each morning. The naked, cruel rocks were covered and softened by layers of dried mud that increased in thickness each day, and the balloon seeds which had been riding out the Summer in the relative coolness of the upper atmosphere, fell shrunken and heavy to begin their cycle of life all over again.
Rolston discarded the heat-suit for shorts and a light cloak. Daily he walked and sat beside the shiny white rock on a hillside that was now green with new life. Sometimes he lay and talked to it, going over conversations they'd had, or saying intimate, loving things. On other days he was sullen and silent and barely looked at it. One day he lost control and beat on it with his bare fists until the white perfection was smudged red. Sanity returned to him only when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and he heard the Team psychologist's voice saying gently; "Take it easy, Prince Charming. You'll never get your Sleeping Beauty that way. Now will you ...?"
His daily walks continued—until the day he saw a crack in that flawless white rock.
The sight hit him like a physical blow. He felt sick and weak. All the frustration and anxiety that had been building up in his mind over the past two years of Summer came boiling up, seeking release. He paced backwards and forwards beside it, wringing his bandaged hands together and talking wildly to himself, and the look in his eyes was wild. As he saw the single crack, caused by the steady drop in Kallec's temperature, widen and become many, he wept a little. But not for long. When the rock began to fall apart like a cracked egg, he gave a shout of pure exultation and started tearing the loose pieces away.
Naleen rose, the last few fragments of her heat-resistant grel crysalis falling to the ground. She was more than half asleep, and the golden network of lines that had exuded the crysalis were still crusted by powderings of that rock-hard, organic insulator. Rolston brushed it gently off her face while she breathed deep, shuddering breaths—the first she'd taken since going into Summer hibernation two Earth years ago. Then abruptly Rolston was trying to squeeze the recently regained breath out of her.
They held each other tightly for a very long time, until Naleen got her mouth free long enough to speak with it:
"I want to see Doctor Munsen again ..."
The End
Red Alert
New Worlds – January 1956
It is pleasant to welcome James White with another of his long thought-provoking stories—this time concerning an alien invasion, but told entirely from the alien's viewpoint.
FOR SEVERAL minutes after the main fleet emerged into normal spacetime somewhere within the orbit of Pluto, the flagship drove through the grey unreality that was hyperspace. They were four days of first-order flight away from the objective which Everra would reach in seconds, and despite his coldly logical evaluation of the rewards and risks involved, he wished suddenly that he'd held to the old and well-tried tactics usual in operations of this sort. A Commander was not supposed to desert his Grand Fleet like this.
Though technically, thought Everra di Crennorlin-Su, Governor of three inhabited solar systems and temporarily Commander of a task force comprising three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven units, he was simply leading them. If the operation was successful nobody would remember how long that lead had been.
The greyness around his ship dissolved into the blue-green globe of Earth three thousand miles below, and he was committed to a course of action which was unsafe, unprecedented, and most probably unsane. Everra made a small noise of self-disgust to himself as he activated the communicator. His particular form of insanity wasn't rare. It was called ambition.
"Have the advance scouts, report, please," he said gently, and waited.
Everra had placed the planet under surveillance from the earliest moment after he had been assigned the Earth operation, and it had been one of the initial observations which had given him the idea for his present strategy. During the organisational nightmare of gathering and fitting-out his mighty fleet for their special mission, those reports had continued to come in, and their significance had not changed. Everra had been given a very dirty job—one where a ninety-five per cent loss would be acclaimed as a tactical triumph. But if he could reduce that percentage, or maybe even reverse it, then Everra would go very far indeed. The reports had shown a way in which this might be done.
Five per cent loss, he gloated.
The view-screen on his control desk lit up, and a scoutship Captain hurriedly went through the rituals of respect due to his high rank. "Our analysis of the planet's war potential is complete," he said. "None of the nations maintain large standing armies, but each physically suitable male undergoes at least two of their 'years' military training, so they can be expected to submit readily to authority. The leading 'nations' have large fleets of surface vessels, which we can forget, and a considerable number of transonic atmosphere craft, which we can't afford to—they're dangerously fast and can carry atomic weapons ..."
Unconsciously, the Commander swayed forward in his couch. This was the important part. If Earth should become prematurely-suspicious, and use those weapons on his fleet ... Everra didn't like to think about the probable results.
"... We have detected and marked the sites of all their nuclear armories," the scoutship Captain went on. His voice was very brisk, very clear, and very much aware that it was addressing, personally, a Su Grand Fleet Commander. "But these are no longer kept fully alert; the Earth civilisation is in transition between Stage Six and Seven—nuclear power but as yet no spaceflight—and the war tensions common with early Stage Six are dying out."
We'll soon fix that, the Commander thought grimly.
The officer ended by reporting that a Human high-altitude research group had launched an unmanned rocket into an orbit just beyond their atmosphere, and the Commander's flagship would pass near it in a few seconds time.
INTERESTING, Everra thought. He liked to see the ludicrous mechanisms that a race first put into space. But his pleasure changed to sudden alarm. That was a research rocket, telemetering all sorts of data to its ground control. Suppose it was able to detect his flagship!
"Armaments!" he said sharply.
"Destroy, or take it aboard?" the Armaments Officer asked quickly. He'd been listening, and was already touching a firing
"Destroy, but quietly," Everra said. "An atomic explosion out here would make them suspicious. Use a chemical warhead ... No, wait!"
Everra's mind flashed over the implications of a nuclear explosion out here to the owners of this research rocket, and he abruptly reversed his previous order. He added, "... And put out the refraction screen, we don't want to be caught on their ground radar."
A picture of the Earth rocket flicked onto the Commander's view-screen, sharp, clear and dangerously close. Suppose its instruments had already detected his ship, and relayed the information to the ground? Everra suppressed his growing apprehension: he couldn't know whether he was detected or not, so he must proceed as though he hadn't.
His screen darkened suddenly as a filter snapped into place, then blazed white as the missile found the orbiting rocket. There was a slight tremor as some of the vaporised debris brushed the Flagship's hull.
Everra felt pleased with himself. As he now saw it, the destruction of that orbital rocket could mean just one thing to the nation which had launched it—another nation did not want them to achieve spaceflight. A nation, moreover, with the disquieting ability to send an atomic missile into space to destroy it. Only two other nations had the technology capable of doing that, and one of them had quite recently been this nation's idealogical enemy. Could it be that their peace overtures were just a sham, and they were still secretly arming themselves with long-range nuclear weapons?
And the weaker nations would wonder at that explosion, too, and feel suspicious, and afraid. Encountering that orbital vehicle had been a stroke of luck, Everra realised. The seeds of dissension were already well planted before he had even landed on the planet.
The natives had a saying down there: Divide and Conquer. Ever since that accursed trading ship had run through Sol, then returned to investigate and report the Earth civilisation which it had found, the Commander had thought what a brilliant concept that was. It was going to save an awful lot of lives.
Curtly, he gestured to his Communications Officer that he was ready for the next scout's report.
The second Captain was an Elissnian, who required an interpreter, so the Commander's screen remained blank. He didn't mind that at all, because the sight of the Elissnian body, with its multiplicity of legs, arms and appendages, sometimes upset his digestive tract. What bothered him was the unavoidable slowness of communications made necessary by the sign-language they had to use when speaking with non-telepaths. But the Elissni were sensitive to trends and motivations in large and small population groups, an ability which made them the most efficient social technicians and mass psychology experts in the Galaxy. Everra had been lucky to get so many of them at such short notice.
The Elissnian reported that his analysis of the economic and cultural stresses present on the planet—both current and those likely to develop through the Commander's intervention—was almost complete; also, all scoutships and smaller craft now carried at least one Elissnian telepath, so that the Commander could receive detailed on-the-spot reports from any sector.
The reports came in quickly after that. He learned the names of oceans, continents, countries and most of the chief cities, together with their locations. He already had data on their systems of time and distance measurement, and had been forcing himself to think in those divisions for the past two days. It avoided the confusion of constant mental translation when overhearing data in an Earth language. Everra had to know this planet, its strengths and its failings, like a native. His success depended on it.
As his mighty Flagship slid into Earth's atmosphere and dropped towards the North Polar icecap, Everra thought of the tremendous fleet converging on this third and inhabited planet of Sol, and wondered wryly if it would have a Commander when it arrived.
THREE MILES above the grey, storm-tossed Atlantic, an aircraft droned steadily across a white monotony of cloud. The whine of its four turbo-jets gave an angry, impatient note to the thunder of its passage, though only a whisper penetrated to the sound-proofed passenger compartment. Neither were its passengers aware of the life-ship from Everra's Arctic base which, rendered invisible by its refraction screen, paced it a few hundred yards away, and they were happily ignorant of the instruments focussed on them which made every thought, word and action plain to the alien observers.
Especially those of a uniformed Human with a diplomatic dispatch case chained to his wrist.
Suddenly the aircraft seemed to stagger in mid-air. The engines died abruptly and it skidded into a spinning, fluttering dive. Control surfaces flapped spasmodically, in a desperate attempt to halt the crazy plunge towards destruction. The effort was wasted.
Trailing the helpless aircraft like a giant kite at the end of its tractor beam, the life-ship continued its dive seawards. It wasn't until angry grey mountains of water, with spray blowing off their peaks, were rolling past a scant thousand feet below that the invisible life-ship released its tractor beam.
Engines roared back to life then, and the aircraft levelled out and slowly climbed towards the cloud base and sunshine again. A female Human began moving along the plane with a cheerful but altogether untrue account of the mishap, adding that the machine was returning to Gander for a check-up.
"Nice work, Captain," said Everra. The whole incident had been relayed to his master screen. The Flagship was now buried in Arctic ice, and while the low temperature suited him, he had no intention of going out to personally supervise operations in the poisonous mixture of oxygen and nitrogen which the Humans called an atmosphere.
"As you know," the Commander went on, "that courier is carrying messages which, if delivered to his chiefs, would greatly ease the tension now developing between those two nations since the destruction of that orbital rocket. Doubtless the courier will try to reach home on another aircraft. You will temporarily disable that plane also, stopping its power plant, then using your tractor beam to make it lose height rapidly.
She began by telling him that she was a freak, and that he only wanted to drag her around as a sort of pet animal. Dr. Munsen had told her that the skin markings would never quite disappear in her, or the grel gland system connected with them though the Shots would neutralize it. He was abnormal for wanting to marry a freak like her. People would laugh at her wherever she went with him, and he'd be laughing at her, too. He was a sadist, she accused, an ego-maniac. She hated him, his Team, and all the Earthmen there ever were—but mostly him. She didn't have enough of his words to tell him how much she hated him, but she was going to try ...
Rolston replied harshly that she didn't know what she was talking about, and she'd no business trying to analyse him with the few scraps of elementary psychology that the Educators had taught her. Dr. Munsen had been angry because she was the cause of his having to stay here, and this must have made him tactless and caused some misunderstanding.
But his replies didn't satisfy Naleen. Her accusations became wilder and more hysterical, and his answers to them grew angrier and more contemptuous.
The whole thing was merely a last outburst—a final release of mental pressure—before her final surrender. He should have realised that and let her blow off steam. But instead he went on making scathingly logical answers to accusations that Naleen knew herself to be silly. He should have held on, but he was every bit as impatient as Dr. Munsen to get away from Kallec, and the heat and sheer frustration made his nerves like taut wires. He needed the momentary luxury of losing his temper just a little bit, his tightly-knotted nervous system demanded it.
But when he lost his temper, he lost it all.
Hazily, he knew that he had sunk his fingers into her shoulders, and shaken her until her teeth clicked together and her glorious white hair fell all over her face. He had heard his own voice shouting that he was going to shake some sense into her, but there was an unreal, dreamlike quality to it. It couldn't have been his voice, he couldn't bring himself to hurt Naleen in any way. Not Naleen. But the passion-thickened voice and the vice-like fingers were his all right, and he was suddenly shocked back into reality when Naleen twisted free and ran away crying.
Desperately Rolston began running after her, for he knew what she might do.
He caught her, almost, at the exit port—the seal nearly closed on his fingers. Then she was through, and a viewer over the port showed her running madly over the burning ground away from the Dome.
With desperate haste Rolston struggled into a heat-suit, keeping his eyes on the wavering, heat-distorted image of Naleen that grew steadily smaller in the view-screen. It was early Summer; unprotected he wouldn't last two minutes in the hell outside the Dome. When he got out at last she was a hundred yards away. In an agony of guilt and sorrow he called her back. She kept on going. He tried to follow her, but the cumbersome suit held him back. She drew steadily away, and he saw her climb the hillside that they'd come to know so well, the pitiless glare of that blast-furnace sun making her hair and tunic a blob of brilliant light against the blackened ground surface. Near the summit he saw her slow, stagger, and collapse.
When he reached her ten minutes later she was lying curled up in a foetal position, and the things the heat was doing to her made him gag. He couldn't bear to lift her, or touch her even. She was slowly ... bubbling, and changing colour. Great globules of sticky white stuff were forming on her skin, bursting, and spreading—faster and faster. He tried to shade her with his body, but he knew it was hopeless from the start. He forced his eyes to look at the thing that had been Naleen, and slowly, monotonously, he cursed the sun.
He was still crouching over her when the Team psychologist and two Kallecians came out to take him back. The natives were also in heat-suits—the Standardisation Shots having neutralised their grel function, they needed them now as much as the Earthmen—and were being sympathetic and philosophical about Rolston's loss in voices that were too highly amplified. Naleen, they told him solemnly, was great, highly-respected, and unusual ... or words to that effect. Her parents also had been great and had lived through many Summers, very many Summers. The natives kept talking about how great and unusual Naleen and her parents were until Rolston felt like smashing their kindly, reassuring skulls together.
An hour after they returned to the Dome, a native spokesman informed the Team that, because of what had happened to Naleen, nobody was going to leave Kallec until the end of the present Summer.
ALL THAT had been twenty months ago. Rolston thought as he gave the shiny white rock on the scorched hillside a final look before he began retracing his steps to the Dome, and the pain and anxiety, the sheer frustration and the awful, maddening uncertainty was as bad today as it had been then. Worse even. The natives hadn't blamed him, he knew, they understood and left him alone. Dr. Munsen, though he still must have felt a burning impatience at being forced to remain on Kallec with nothing much to do, neither talked about it nor showed it in any way; he, too, understood. But the Team psychologist on the other hand, showed deep professional concern over Rolston's condition, and had hinted several times that he'd like to do something about it. But while he had drugs and techniques at his disposal that could wipe the whole Naleen incident from Rolston's memory and make him normally well-adjusted again, the same code of ethics that forbade the Medic administering the Shots to Naleen against the girl's will kept him from using his wonderfully efficient curative methods until he was requested to do so.
Rolston therefore, continued his daily walks. Slowly as Kallec climbed towards aphelion along its eccentric, near-cometary orbit, Summer merged into Autumn. The Night Rain which converted the outside of the Dome into a world of boiling mud and super-heated steam began to collect in cracks and gullies, and remain as a liquid for longer periods each morning. The naked, cruel rocks were covered and softened by layers of dried mud that increased in thickness each day, and the balloon seeds which had been riding out the Summer in the relative coolness of the upper atmosphere, fell shrunken and heavy to begin their cycle of life all over again.
Rolston discarded the heat-suit for shorts and a light cloak. Daily he walked and sat beside the shiny white rock on a hillside that was now green with new life. Sometimes he lay and talked to it, going over conversations they'd had, or saying intimate, loving things. On other days he was sullen and silent and barely looked at it. One day he lost control and beat on it with his bare fists until the white perfection was smudged red. Sanity returned to him only when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and he heard the Team psychologist's voice saying gently; "Take it easy, Prince Charming. You'll never get your Sleeping Beauty that way. Now will you ...?"
His daily walks continued—until the day he saw a crack in that flawless white rock.
The sight hit him like a physical blow. He felt sick and weak. All the frustration and anxiety that had been building up in his mind over the past two years of Summer came boiling up, seeking release. He paced backwards and forwards beside it, wringing his bandaged hands together and talking wildly to himself, and the look in his eyes was wild. As he saw the single crack, caused by the steady drop in Kallec's temperature, widen and become many, he wept a little. But not for long. When the rock began to fall apart like a cracked egg, he gave a shout of pure exultation and started tearing the loose pieces away.
Naleen rose, the last few fragments of her heat-resistant grel crysalis falling to the ground. She was more than half asleep, and the golden network of lines that had exuded the crysalis were still crusted by powderings of that rock-hard, organic insulator. Rolston brushed it gently off her face while she breathed deep, shuddering breaths—the first she'd taken since going into Summer hibernation two Earth years ago. Then abruptly Rolston was trying to squeeze the recently regained breath out of her.
They held each other tightly for a very long time, until Naleen got her mouth free long enough to speak with it:
"I want to see Doctor Munsen again ..."
The End
Red Alert
New Worlds – January 1956
It is pleasant to welcome James White with another of his long thought-provoking stories—this time concerning an alien invasion, but told entirely from the alien's viewpoint.
FOR SEVERAL minutes after the main fleet emerged into normal spacetime somewhere within the orbit of Pluto, the flagship drove through the grey unreality that was hyperspace. They were four days of first-order flight away from the objective which Everra would reach in seconds, and despite his coldly logical evaluation of the rewards and risks involved, he wished suddenly that he'd held to the old and well-tried tactics usual in operations of this sort. A Commander was not supposed to desert his Grand Fleet like this.
Though technically, thought Everra di Crennorlin-Su, Governor of three inhabited solar systems and temporarily Commander of a task force comprising three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven units, he was simply leading them. If the operation was successful nobody would remember how long that lead had been.
The greyness around his ship dissolved into the blue-green globe of Earth three thousand miles below, and he was committed to a course of action which was unsafe, unprecedented, and most probably unsane. Everra made a small noise of self-disgust to himself as he activated the communicator. His particular form of insanity wasn't rare. It was called ambition.
"Have the advance scouts, report, please," he said gently, and waited.
Everra had placed the planet under surveillance from the earliest moment after he had been assigned the Earth operation, and it had been one of the initial observations which had given him the idea for his present strategy. During the organisational nightmare of gathering and fitting-out his mighty fleet for their special mission, those reports had continued to come in, and their significance had not changed. Everra had been given a very dirty job—one where a ninety-five per cent loss would be acclaimed as a tactical triumph. But if he could reduce that percentage, or maybe even reverse it, then Everra would go very far indeed. The reports had shown a way in which this might be done.
Five per cent loss, he gloated.
The view-screen on his control desk lit up, and a scoutship Captain hurriedly went through the rituals of respect due to his high rank. "Our analysis of the planet's war potential is complete," he said. "None of the nations maintain large standing armies, but each physically suitable male undergoes at least two of their 'years' military training, so they can be expected to submit readily to authority. The leading 'nations' have large fleets of surface vessels, which we can forget, and a considerable number of transonic atmosphere craft, which we can't afford to—they're dangerously fast and can carry atomic weapons ..."
Unconsciously, the Commander swayed forward in his couch. This was the important part. If Earth should become prematurely-suspicious, and use those weapons on his fleet ... Everra didn't like to think about the probable results.
"... We have detected and marked the sites of all their nuclear armories," the scoutship Captain went on. His voice was very brisk, very clear, and very much aware that it was addressing, personally, a Su Grand Fleet Commander. "But these are no longer kept fully alert; the Earth civilisation is in transition between Stage Six and Seven—nuclear power but as yet no spaceflight—and the war tensions common with early Stage Six are dying out."
We'll soon fix that, the Commander thought grimly.
The officer ended by reporting that a Human high-altitude research group had launched an unmanned rocket into an orbit just beyond their atmosphere, and the Commander's flagship would pass near it in a few seconds time.
INTERESTING, Everra thought. He liked to see the ludicrous mechanisms that a race first put into space. But his pleasure changed to sudden alarm. That was a research rocket, telemetering all sorts of data to its ground control. Suppose it was able to detect his flagship!
"Armaments!" he said sharply.
"Destroy, or take it aboard?" the Armaments Officer asked quickly. He'd been listening, and was already touching a firing
"Destroy, but quietly," Everra said. "An atomic explosion out here would make them suspicious. Use a chemical warhead ... No, wait!"
Everra's mind flashed over the implications of a nuclear explosion out here to the owners of this research rocket, and he abruptly reversed his previous order. He added, "... And put out the refraction screen, we don't want to be caught on their ground radar."
A picture of the Earth rocket flicked onto the Commander's view-screen, sharp, clear and dangerously close. Suppose its instruments had already detected his ship, and relayed the information to the ground? Everra suppressed his growing apprehension: he couldn't know whether he was detected or not, so he must proceed as though he hadn't.
His screen darkened suddenly as a filter snapped into place, then blazed white as the missile found the orbiting rocket. There was a slight tremor as some of the vaporised debris brushed the Flagship's hull.
Everra felt pleased with himself. As he now saw it, the destruction of that orbital rocket could mean just one thing to the nation which had launched it—another nation did not want them to achieve spaceflight. A nation, moreover, with the disquieting ability to send an atomic missile into space to destroy it. Only two other nations had the technology capable of doing that, and one of them had quite recently been this nation's idealogical enemy. Could it be that their peace overtures were just a sham, and they were still secretly arming themselves with long-range nuclear weapons?
And the weaker nations would wonder at that explosion, too, and feel suspicious, and afraid. Encountering that orbital vehicle had been a stroke of luck, Everra realised. The seeds of dissension were already well planted before he had even landed on the planet.
The natives had a saying down there: Divide and Conquer. Ever since that accursed trading ship had run through Sol, then returned to investigate and report the Earth civilisation which it had found, the Commander had thought what a brilliant concept that was. It was going to save an awful lot of lives.
Curtly, he gestured to his Communications Officer that he was ready for the next scout's report.
The second Captain was an Elissnian, who required an interpreter, so the Commander's screen remained blank. He didn't mind that at all, because the sight of the Elissnian body, with its multiplicity of legs, arms and appendages, sometimes upset his digestive tract. What bothered him was the unavoidable slowness of communications made necessary by the sign-language they had to use when speaking with non-telepaths. But the Elissni were sensitive to trends and motivations in large and small population groups, an ability which made them the most efficient social technicians and mass psychology experts in the Galaxy. Everra had been lucky to get so many of them at such short notice.
The Elissnian reported that his analysis of the economic and cultural stresses present on the planet—both current and those likely to develop through the Commander's intervention—was almost complete; also, all scoutships and smaller craft now carried at least one Elissnian telepath, so that the Commander could receive detailed on-the-spot reports from any sector.
The reports came in quickly after that. He learned the names of oceans, continents, countries and most of the chief cities, together with their locations. He already had data on their systems of time and distance measurement, and had been forcing himself to think in those divisions for the past two days. It avoided the confusion of constant mental translation when overhearing data in an Earth language. Everra had to know this planet, its strengths and its failings, like a native. His success depended on it.
As his mighty Flagship slid into Earth's atmosphere and dropped towards the North Polar icecap, Everra thought of the tremendous fleet converging on this third and inhabited planet of Sol, and wondered wryly if it would have a Commander when it arrived.
THREE MILES above the grey, storm-tossed Atlantic, an aircraft droned steadily across a white monotony of cloud. The whine of its four turbo-jets gave an angry, impatient note to the thunder of its passage, though only a whisper penetrated to the sound-proofed passenger compartment. Neither were its passengers aware of the life-ship from Everra's Arctic base which, rendered invisible by its refraction screen, paced it a few hundred yards away, and they were happily ignorant of the instruments focussed on them which made every thought, word and action plain to the alien observers.
Especially those of a uniformed Human with a diplomatic dispatch case chained to his wrist.
Suddenly the aircraft seemed to stagger in mid-air. The engines died abruptly and it skidded into a spinning, fluttering dive. Control surfaces flapped spasmodically, in a desperate attempt to halt the crazy plunge towards destruction. The effort was wasted.
Trailing the helpless aircraft like a giant kite at the end of its tractor beam, the life-ship continued its dive seawards. It wasn't until angry grey mountains of water, with spray blowing off their peaks, were rolling past a scant thousand feet below that the invisible life-ship released its tractor beam.
Engines roared back to life then, and the aircraft levelled out and slowly climbed towards the cloud base and sunshine again. A female Human began moving along the plane with a cheerful but altogether untrue account of the mishap, adding that the machine was returning to Gander for a check-up.
"Nice work, Captain," said Everra. The whole incident had been relayed to his master screen. The Flagship was now buried in Arctic ice, and while the low temperature suited him, he had no intention of going out to personally supervise operations in the poisonous mixture of oxygen and nitrogen which the Humans called an atmosphere.
"As you know," the Commander went on, "that courier is carrying messages which, if delivered to his chiefs, would greatly ease the tension now developing between those two nations since the destruction of that orbital rocket. Doubtless the courier will try to reach home on another aircraft. You will temporarily disable that plane also, stopping its power plant, then using your tractor beam to make it lose height rapidly.
