“Why should I?” Cassel asked.

  “Because,” Morse answered, almost in a whisper, “I am about to ram it right down your fat throat.”

  Cassel grinned and tightened his fists. “Pleasure,” he said. “I’m tired of looking at that scar of yours.” He stood up.

  “Cut it,” Edwardson said wearily. “Watch the birdie.”

  “No reason to, really,” Morse said, leaning back. “There’s an alarm bell attached.” But he looked at the dial.

  “What if the bell doesn’t work?” Edwardson asked. “What if the dial is jammed? How would you like something cold slithering into your mind?”

  “The dial’ll work,” Cassel said. His eyes shifted from Ed-wardson’s face to the motionless indicator.

  “I think I’ll sack in,” Edwardson said.

  “Stick around,” Cassel said. “Play you some gin.”

  “All right,” Edwardson found and shuffled the greasy cards, while Morse took a turn glaring at the dial.

  “I sure wish they’d come,” he said.

  “Cut,” Edwardson said, handing the pack to Cassel.

  “I wonder what our friends look like,” Morse said, watching the dial.

  “Probably remarkably like us,” Edwardson said, dealing the cards. Cassel picked them up one by one, slowly, as if he hoped something interesting would be under them.

  “They should have given us another man,” Cassel said, “We could play bridge.”

  “I don’t play bridge,” Edwardson said,

  “You could learn.”

  “Why didn’t we send a task force?” Morse asked. “Why didn’t we bomb their planet?”

  “Don’t be dumb,” Edwardson said. “We’d lose any ship we sent. Probably get them back at us, possessed and firing.”

  “Knock with nine,” Cassel said.

  “I don’t give a good damn if you knock with a thousand,” Edwardson said gaily. “How much do I owe you now?”

  “Three million five hundred and eight thousand and ten dollars.”

  “I sure wish they’d come,” Morse said.

  “Want me to write a cheque?”

  “Take your time. Take until next week.”

  “Someone should reason with the bastards,” Morse said, looking out the port. Cassel immediately looked at the dial.

  “I just thought of something,” Edwardson said.

  “Yeh?”

  “I bet it feels horrible to have your mind grabbed,” Edwardson said. “I bet it’s awful.”

  “You’ll know when it happens,” Cassel said.

  “Did Everset?”

  “Probably. He just couldn’t do anything about it”

  “My mind feels fine,” Cassel said. “But the first one of you guys starts acting queer—watch out”

  They all laughed.

  “Well,” Edwardson said, “I’d sure like a chance to reason with them. This is stupid.”

  “Why not?” Cassel asked.

  “You mean go out and meet them?”

  “Sure,” Cassel said. “We’re doing no good sitting here.”

  “I should think we could do something,” Edwardson said slowly. “After all, they’re not invincible. They’re reasoning beings.”

  Morse punched a course on the ship’s tape, then looked up.

  “You think we should contact the command? Tell them what we’re doing?”

  “No!” Cassei said and Edwardson nodded in agreement “Red tape. We’ll just go out and see what we can do. If they won’t talk, we’ll blast ’em out of space.”

  “Look!”

  Out of the port they could see the red flare of a reacton engine; the next ship in their sector, speeding forward.

  ’They must have got the same idea,” Edwardson said.

  “Let’s get there first,” Cassei said. Morse shoved the accelerator in and they were thrown back in their seats.

  “That dial hasn’t moved yet, has it?” Edwardson asked, over the clamour of the Detector alarm bell.

  “Not a move out of it,” Cassei said, looking at the dial with its indicator slammed all the way over to the highest notch.

  EQUATOR

  By Brian Aldiss

  Brian Aldiss is Britain’s major contribution to the ranks of the top modern Science Fiction writers. With a series of well-plotted, imaginative and totally engrossing works he has won a wide following on both sides of the Atlantic—apart from carrying off a number of top literary prizes. A newspaperman by profession, Aldiss displays a questing mind in his writing and a special ability to combine flights of fancy with concrete facts. This novelette of insurgence and espionage set against a background of Sumatra—which Aldiss knows—is an interesting experiment in S.F.; and dating as it does from 1958, marks quite a definite point in the author’s career. Settle yourself well, this is not an easy story to put down.

  I

  Evening shadows came across the spaceport in long strides. It was the one time of day when you could almost feel the world rotating. In the rays of the sinking sun, dusty palms round the spaceport looked like so many varnished cardboard props. By day, these palms seemed metal; by evening, so much papier maché. In the tropics, nothing was itself, merely fabric stretched over heat, poses over pulses.

  The palms bowed stiffly as Scout Ship AX25 blasted up into the sky, peppering them with another spray of dust.

  The three occupants of the ship were rocked back on their acceleration couches for only a few seconds. Then Allan Cunliffe got up, strolled casually over to the port and gazed out. Nobody would guess from his composed face that the ship had just embarked on a hazardous mission.

  “At once you begin to live,” he said, looking down at the world with a kind of pride.

  His friend, Tyne Leslie, nodded in an attempt at agreement. It was the best, at the moment, that he could do. Joining Allan, he too looked out Already, he observed wonderingly, the mighty panorama of sunset was only a red stain on a carpet below them; Sumatra lay across the equator like a roasting fish on a spit Outside: a starry void In his stomach: another starry void.

  At once you begin to live…But this was Tyne’s first trip on the spy patrol; living meant extra adrenalin walloping through his heart valves, the centipede track of prickles over his skin, the starry void in the lesser intestine.

  “It’s the sort of feeling you don’t get behind an office desk,” he said. Chalk one up to the office desk, he thought.

  Allan nodded, saying nothing. His silences were always positive. When the rest of the world was talking as it never had before, Allan Cunliffe remained silent. Certainly he had as many mixed feelings about the Rosks as anyone else on Earth: but he kept the lid on them. It was that quality as much as any other that had guaranteed a firm friendship between Allan and Tyne, long before the latter followed his friend’s lead and joined the Space Service.

  “Let’s get forward and see Murray,” Allan said, clapping Tyne on the back. Undoubtedly he had divined something of the other’s feelings.

  The scout was small, one of the Bristol-Cunard “Hynam” line, a three-berth job with light armament and Betson-Wat-son “Medmenham X” accelerators. The third member of the team, its leader, was Captain Murray Mumford, one of the first men ever to set eyes on the Rosks, four years ago.

  He grinned at the other two as they came into the cabin, set the autopilot, and turned round to face them.

  “Lunar in five and a fraction hours,” he said. Once you had seen Murray, you would never forget him. Physically he was no more and no less than a superb specimen of broad-shouldered manhood. Five minutes with him convinced you that he had that extraordinary persuasive ability which, without a word being said, could convert potential rivals into admirers. Tyne, always sensitive to the current of human feelings, was aware of this magnetic quality of Murray’s; he distrusted it merely because he knew Murray himself was aware of it and frequently used it to his own advantage.

  “Well, what’s the picture?” he asked, accepting a mesca-hale from Allan, trying to appear at ease.

  “With any luck, we’ll have a pretty quiet job for your first live op,” Murray replied, as they lit their mescahales. “The target area, as you know, is Luna Area 101. Luna Intelligence reports a new object outside one of the Roskian domes. It’s small and immobile—so far, at any rate. It’s outside a dome on the southern perimeter of Area 101, which means it is fairly accessible from our point of view.”

  “What’s the state of light there now, Murray?” Allan asked.

  “Sundown in Grimaldi, which contains Area 101, was four hours ago. Intelligence suspects the Rosks may be planning something under cover of darkness; we have imposed a lot of shipping restrictions on their Earth-Luna route lately. So our orders are to slip in from the night side and investigate—obviously without being seen, if possible. Just a quick look over, personal inspection in spacesuits. We should not be out of the ship for more than twenty minutes. Then we streak for home again, heroes all.”

  The starry void blossomed up again in Tyne’s midriff. Action; this was what he feared and what he wanted. He looked at the lunar map Murray carelessly indicated. One small square of it, low in the third quadrant covering Grimaldi, had been shaded yellow. This was Area 101. Beside it, in the same yellow crayon, one word had been written: Rosk.

  Tyne noticed Murray studying his face intently, and turned away. “World Government made a great mistake in allowing the Rosks a base away from Earth,” he said.

  “You were the diplomat when Allan and I were just squaddies in the Space Service,” Murray said, smiling. “You tell us why Area 101 was conceded to them.”

  “The official reason given,” Allan said, stepping in to back up his friend, “was that while we were being kind to aliens we could not expect a space-travelling race to be pinned to one planet; we were morally obliged to cede them a part of Grimaldi, so that they could indulge in Earth-Moon flight.”

  “Yes, that was the official face-saver.” Tyne agreed. “Whenever it is beaten on any point of an agenda, World Government, the United Nations Council, declares itself ‘morally obliged’. In actual fact, we had rings made round us. The Rosks are so much better at argument and debate than we are, that at first they could talk themselves into anything they wanted.”

  “And now the Space Service sorts out the results of the politicians’ muddle,” Murray said. It sounded slightly like, a personal jibe; Tyne could not forget he had once been in politics; and in his present state of tension, he did not ignore the remark.

  “You’d better ask yourself how fine a job the S.S. is doing, Murray. Human-Roskian relations have deteriorated to such an extent this last year, that if we get caught in Area 101, we may well precipitate a war.”

  “Spoken like a diplomat!” Murray exclaimed sarcastically.

  The three of them spent most of the next four and a half hours reading, hardly speaking at all.

  “Better look alert. Put your books away,” Murray said suddenly, jumping up and returning to the cabin.

  “Don’t mind Murray; he often behaves like a musclebound schoolmaster,” Allan said laughing.

  Not often, Tyne admitted to himself without bothering to contradict his friend aloud. Murray had drunk with them several times at the Madeka Hotal in Sumatra; his manner then had been far from schoolmasterly. He thought of Murray knocking back carioka till the early hours, rising later to eat with a monstrous appetite, while Allan and Tyne beside him pushed away at die large unappetizing breakfast the hotel provided.

  The immediate present eclipsed Tyne’s thoughts as the great black segment of moon slid up at them. It was like falling into a smile-shaped hole. Radar-guided, the scout became a tiny, moving chip of a ship again, instead of a little world in its own right A few lights gleamed far ahead: Rosk lights, shining up from Area 101.

  “Strap in!” Murray said, over the intercom.

  They were braking. As deceleration increased, it felt as if they were plunging through water, then soup, then treacle, then wood. Then they weren’t plunging at all. They were feather-light. With a bump, they stopped. They were down.

  “All change; pleise have your alien identity cards ready!” said Allan. Tyne wondered how he was feeling, even as Allan smiled reassuringly at him.

  Murray left the cahin, walking with something like a swagger. He was pleasantly excited. For him, this was the simple life, with no cares but the present one.

  “The radar-baffle’s on,” he said. “No signs of alarm from our friends outside. Let’s get into our suits as fast as possible.”

  They climbed into the spacesuits. The process took half an hour, during which Tyne sweated freely, wondering all the-while if their ship had been sighted by Rosk lookouts. But there was no alternative. The spacesuit is a tool: a bulky, complex, hazardous, pernickety tool for surviving where one is not meant to survive. It needs endless adjustment before it can be trusted. There was not a spacer in the system who did not hate spacesuits, or envy the Rosks their immeasurably superior variety.

  At last they had lashed, strapped, dogged and screwed each other into place. Three monstrous robots bumbled round slowly in the confined space, nearly filling the ship with their bulk; they made with slow, underwater, gestures for the hatch. Five minutes later, they were all standing on the lunar surface in complete darkness. v In what were already regarded as the old palmy days, before the Rosks arrived in the system, Tyne had frequently been up to the moon, on pleasure and business. He was not prepared for how bleakly uninviting the place appeared now. In the Grade-A darkness, Grimaldi was a desert of frozen soot.

  “We’ve something less than half a mile to the target dome,” Murray said, his voice a whisper in the headsets. “Let’s move!”

  They saw by infra-red extensions. Murray led them along by the crater edge, treading round spines of outcropping debris. The alien domes became visible as black breasts against sequin-studded silk. Through the little grille of his suit window, Tyne saw the world as a plaster mock-up of a reality too unreal ever to be true. He himself was a pigmy imprisoned in the iron bowel of a robot heading for destruction. Fighting off that irrational sensation, he peered ahead for the strange object they had come to investigate.

  Something lay ahead. It was impossible to see what it was. Tyne touched Allan’s arm. The latter swung round, and then stared in the direction in which Tyne pointed. Murray paused, making a clumsily impatient gesture to them to come on. Perhaps he feels vulnerable as I do, Tyne thought, sympathetically, pointing again through the blackness for Murray’s benefit.

  Next second, they were bathed in the ashy glare of a searchlight, skewered neatly in mid-gesture.

  The light came not from the domes ahead, but to one side, from a point by the crater wall. Tyne just stood there, blinded, knowing they were trapped.

  “Drop!” Allan shouted.

  “Shoot the light out!” Murray said. His great metal-claw went down piston-fashion to the service pistol, came up levelling the cumbrous weapon, jerked with the recoil. Allan and Tyne heard the shots only as vibrant thuds through Murray’s suit mike.

  He got the light. It cut off—but already another beam was striking out from the nearest dome, swerving and sending an oval across the ash towards them. Probably they were being fired at, Tyne thought detachedly; you would not know until you were hit. He had his pistol out and was firing too, rather wildly, but towards where the enemy attack would come from.

  “Here they come! Make for the ship, Tyne!” Allan bellowed. As the new searchlight swamped them, Tyne caught a glimpse of moving forms. The Rosks had been lying in wait for them. Then a hammerblow struck his shoulder, sending illuminated pain like a crazy neon system all over his body. Gasping, he heard his suit creak with all the abandon of a falling tree. He was going over…and as he went, he had a jigsaw puzzle, upside-down, glimpse of approaching Rosks.

  When the Rosks had arrived in the solar system four and a half years before, one unambitious day in March, 2189, an epoch ended, though comparatively few people realized it at the time. Man’s time of isolation was over. No longer could he regard himself as the only sentient being in the universe. On his doorstep stood a race superior to him scientifically if not morally.

  The shock of the Roskian arrival was felt most severely in those countries which for several centuries had been accustomed to regarding themselves as the world’s rulers, or the arbiters of its conduct They were now in the position of a school bully, who, looking carefully over his shoulder, finds the headmaster standing over him.

  The Rosks came in one mighty ship, and a quarter of the world’s population quaked in fear; another quarter cheered with excitement; the wiser half reserved judgment, Some of them, four and a half years later, were still reserving judgment. The Rosks were no easier to sum up than Earthmen.

  Superficially, a Rosk resembled a man. Not a white man but, say, a Malayan. Their appearance varied from one to another, but most of them had light brown skins, no bridge to their noses, dark eyes. Their body temperature was 105.1 degrees, a sign of the hotter planet from which they came.

  When the Rosks arrived, Tyne Leslie was the youngest second secretary to an under-secretary to the Under-Secretary of the British Corps of the United Nations Council. He had witnessed the endless fluttering in ministerial dovecotes that went on all over the world as the realities of the Rosk-Man situation became apparent For the true situation emerged only gradually, while language barriers were being broken down. And the true situation was both complicated and unpleasant.

  Man learnt something of this impasse from a yellow-haired Rosk, Tawdell Co Barr, who was one of the first Roskian spokesmen on the U.N.C.

  “Our mother ship,” he explained, “is an interstellar vessel housing four interplanetary craft and something more than five thousand of our people, male and female. Most of them are colonists, seeking only a world to live in. We have come from a world you would call Alpha Centauri II; ours is the first interstellar voyage ever made from the beautiful but overcrowded planet We came to Sol, our nearest neighbour in the vastness of space, seeking room to live—only to find that its one habitable planet is already swarming with men. Although we are happy to meet another sentient race, the depth of our disappointment otherwise cannot be measured: our journey, our long journey, has been in vain.”

 

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