First Command (46 page)

There was traffic on the canal again, big barges like the one of which the crew had been thrown into such a panic. There were three boats outbound from the city. These, sighting the thing in the sky, turned in a flurry of reversed screws and hard-over rudders, narrowly escaping ramming one another, scurried back to the protection of the high stone walls. The probe hovered and allowed them to make their escape unpursued.

And then, surging out from between the massive piers of a stone bridge, the watergate, came a low black shape, a white bone in its teeth, trailing a dense streamer of gray smoke. It had a minimal funnel and a heavily armored wheelhouse aft, a domed turret forward. Through two parallel slits in the dome protruded twin barrels. There was little doubt as to what they were, even though there was a strong resemblance to an old-fashioned observatory. “Those sure as hell aren’t telescopes!” muttered Brabham. The barrels lifted as the dome swiveled. “Get her upstairs, pilot!” ordered Grimes. “Fast!” Tangye stabbed in fumbling haste at his controls, keeping the probe’s camera trained on the gunboat, which dwindled rapidly in the screen as the robot lifted. Yellow flame and dirty white smoke flashed from the
two
muzzles—but it was obvious that the result would not be even a near miss. Antiaircraft guns those cannon might well be, but their gunners were not used to firing at such a swift moving target.

“All right,” said Grimes. “Hold her at that, Mr. Tangye. We can always take evasive action again if we have to. I doubt if those are very rapid-fire guns.”

“I—I can’t,” mumbled the navigator. In the screen the picture of the city and its environs was dwindling fast. “You
can’t?
”

Tangye, at his console, was giving an impersonation of an overly enthusiastic concert pianist. The lock of long fair hair that had flopped down over his forehead aided the illusion. He cried despairingly, “She—she won’t answer.”

“Their gunnery must have been better than we thought,” remarked Brabham, with morose satisfaction.

“Rubbish!” snapped Swinton. “I watched for the shell bursts. They were right at the edge of the screen. Nowhere near the target.”

“Mr. Brabham,” asked Grimes coldly, “did you satisfy yourself that the probe was in good working order? A speck of dust in the wrong place, perhaps . . . a drop of moisture . . . a fleck of corrosion.”

“Of course, sir,” sneered Brabham, “all the equipment supplied to
this
ship is nothing but the best. I don’t think!”

“It is
your
job, Number One,” Grimes told him, “to bring it up to standard.”

“I’m not a miracle worker. And I’d like to point out, sir, that this probe that we are—sorry,
were
—using—”

“I’m still using it!” objected Tangye.

“After a fashion.” Then, to Grimes again: “This probe, Captain, has already seen service aboard
Pathfinder, Wayfarer,
and, just before
we
got it,
Endeavor—
all of them senior ships to this, with four ring captains.”

“Are you insinuating,” asked Grimes, “that mere commanders get captains’ leavings?” (He had thought the same himself, but did not like Brabham’s using it as an excuse.)

“Sir!” It was Tangye again. “The screen’s gone blank. We’ve lost the picture!”

“And the telemetering?”

“Still working—most of it. But she’s going up like a rocket. I can’t stop her. She’s—Sir! She’s had it! She must have blown up!”

Grimes broke the uneasy silence in the control room. “Write off one probe,” he said at last. “Luckily the taxpayer has a deep pocket. Unluckily I’m a taxpayer myself. And so are all of you.”

“One would never think so,” sneered Brandt.

“Send down the other probe, sir?” asked Brabham sulkily.

“What is its service history?” countered Grimes.

“The same as the one Mr. Tangye just lost.”

“It lost itself!” the navigator objected hotly.

Grimes ignored the exchange. He went on, “It has, I suppose, received the same loving attention aboard this ship as its mate?”

Brabham made no reply.

“Then it stays in its bay until such time as it has been subjected to a thorough—and I mean
thorough—
overhaul. Meanwhile, I think that we shall be able to run a fair preliminary survey of this planet if we put the ship into a circumpolar orbit. We might even be able to find out for sure if there are any wars actually in progress at this moment. I must confess that the existence of readily available antiaircraft artillery rather shook me.”

“What are you saying in your preliminary report to Base, Commander Grimes?” asked Brandt,

“There’s not going to be one,” Grimes told him.

“And why not?” demanded the scientist incredulously.

One reason why not,
thought Grimes,
is that I’m not where I’m supposed to be. I’ll wait until I have a
fait accompli
before I break radio silence.
He said, “We’re far too close to the territorial limits of the Empire of Waverley. If the emperor’s monitors pick up a signal from us and learn that there are Earth-type planets in their back yard we shall have an Imperial battle cruiser squadron getting into our hair in less time than it takes to think about it.”

“But a coded message—” began Brandt.

“Codes are always being broken. And the message would have to be a long one, which means that it would be easy to get a fix on the source of transmission. There will be no leakage of information insofar as this planet is concerned until we have a cast-iron treaty, signed, sealed, and witnessed, with its ruler or rulers. And, in any case, we still have another world to investigate. Mphm.”

He turned to the executive officer. “Commander Brabham, you will organize a working party and take the remaining probe down completely. You will reassemble it only when you are quite satisfied that it will work the way it should.” Then it was the navigator’s turn. “Mr. Tangye, please calculate the maneuvers required to put us in the circumpolar orbit. Let me know when you’ve finished doing your sums.”

He left the control room, well aware that if the hostile eyes directed at his back were laser projectors he would be a well-cooked corpse.

Back in his own quarters he considered sending an initial message to Captain Davinas, then decided against it, even though such a code could never be broken and it would be extremely difficult for anybody to get a fix on such a short transmission. He would wait, he told himself, until he saw which way the cat was going to jump.

Chapter 17

It was an unexpected cat
that jumped.

It took the form of suddenly fracturing welding when the old ship was nudged out of her equatorial orbit into the trajectory that, had all gone well, would have been developed into one taking her over north and south poles while the planet rotated beneath her. With the rupturing of her pressure hull airtight doors slammed shut, and nobody was so unfortunate as to be caught in any of the directly affected compartments. But atmosphere was lost, as were many tons of fresh water from a burst tank. Repairs could be carried out in orbit, but the air and water could be replenished only on a planetary surface.

A landing would have to be made.

A landing—and a preliminary report to Base?

A preliminary report to Base followed, all too probably, by the arrival on the scene of an Imperial warship with kind offers of assistance and a cargo of Waverley flags to be planted on very available site.

So there was no report.

Meanwhile, there was the landing place to select. Grimes wanted somewhere as far as possible from any center of population, but with a supply of fresh water ready to hand. He assumed that the seas of this world were salt and that the rivers and lakes would not be. That was the usual pattern on Earth-type planets, although bitter lakes were not unknown.

There was a large island in one of the oceans, in the northern hemisphere, well out from the coastline of its neighboring continent. By day lakes and rivers could be seen gleaming among its mountains. By night there were no lights to be seen, even along the shore, to indicate the presence of cities, towns, or villages—and
Discovery’s
main telescope could have picked up the glimmer of a solitary candle. With a little bit of luck, thought Grimes, his descent through the atmosphere would go unheard and unobserved. It should be possible to replenish air and water without interference by the natives—and, even more important, without being obliged to interfere with them.

The repairs were carried out while the ship was still in orbit; Grimes had no desire to negotiate an atmosphere in a ship the aerodynamic qualities of which had been impaired. This essential patching up meant that there was no labor to spare to work on the remaining probe—but in these circumstances a landing would have to be made without too much delay. The closed ecology of the ship had been thrown badly out of kilter by the loss of water and atmosphere, and would deteriorate dangerously if time were spent on preliminary surveys.

The landing was timed so that touchdown would be made shortly after sunrise. This meant that there would be a full day in which to work before nightfall—and as it was summer in the northern hemisphere the hours of daylight would be long. Also, a low sun casts long shadows, showing up every slightest irregularity in the ground. A spaceship, descending vertically and with tripedal landing gear, can be set down on quite uneven surfaces; nonetheless the vision of a disastrous topple recurs in the nightmares of every survey ship captain.

During her slow, controlled fall
Discovery
was bathed in bright sunlight while, until the very last few minutes, the terrain directly below her was still in darkness. To the east of the terminator, where there was full daylight, the sea was a glowing blue and, dark against the oceanic horizon, in silhouette against the bright, clear sky, lifted the mountains of the distant mainland.

Night fled to the west and the rugged landscape beneath the ship took on form and color. Yes, there was the lake, an amoeboid splotch of liquid silver almost in the center of the periscope screen, its mirrorlike surface broken by a spattering of black islets. The northern shore was cliffy, and inland from the escarpments the forested hillside was broken by deep gullies. To the south, however, there was a wide, golden beach fronting a grassy plain, beautifully level, although there were outcrops of what seemed to be large boulders. There was an area, however, that seemed to be reasonably clear of the huge stones with their betraying shadows and, applying lateral thrust, Grimes maneuvered his ship until she was directly above it.

“Why not land on the beach, sir?” asked Brabham.

“Sand can be treacherous,” Grimes told him.

“But it will be a long way to lug the hoses,” complained the first lieutenant.

Isn’t that just too bad,
thought Grimes.

He concentrated on his piloting. He might have let the navigator handle a landing at a proper spaceport, with marker beacons and the certainty of a smooth, level surface to sit down on, but Tangye’s reaction times were far too slow to cope with emergencies that might suddenly arise in these circumstances. Tangye was sulking, of course, as was Brabham, and as the bos’n would be when he and his men had to drag the hoses all the way to the lake. There was little wind at this time of the day, and no lateral drift. Grimes found it easy to keep the ship dropping toward the spot that he had selected as his target. He could make out details in the periscope screen now, could see the long grass (it
looked
like grass) flattening, falling into patterns like iron filings in a magnetic field as the downward thrust of the inertial drive was exerted against blades and stems. There were tiny blue flowers, revealed as the longer growth was pushed down and away. There was something like an armored lizard that scuttled frantically across the screen as it ran to escape from the great, inexorably descending mass of the ship. Grimes hoped the creature made it to safety.

The numerals of the radar altimeter, set to measure distance from the pads of the landing gear to the ground, were flickering down the single digits. Seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . only three meters to go. But it would still be a long way down, as far as
those in the control room were concerned, if the ship should topple. Two . . . one . . . a meter to go, and a delicate balance of forces achieved, with the rate of descent measured in fractions of a millimeter a second.

“I wish the old bastard’d get a move on,” whispered somebody. Grimes could not identify the voice. Not that it mattered; everybody was entitled to his own opinions. Until he had coped with a landing himself he had often been critical of various captains’shiphandling.

Zero!

He left the drive running until he felt secure, then cut it.
Discovery
shuddered, complained, and the great shock absorbers sighed loudly. She settled, steadied. The clinometer indicated that she had come to rest a mere half degree from the vertical. What was under her must be solid enough. Grimes relaxed in his chair, filled and lit his pipe.

He said, “All right, Number One. Make it ‘finished with engines,’ but warn the chief that we might want to get upstairs in a hurry. After all, this is a strange and possibly hostile planet. In any case, he’ll be too busy with his pumps to be able to spare the time to take his precious innies apart.”

“I hope,” muttered Brabham.

“Then make sure he knows that he’s not to. Mphm. Meanwhile, I shall require a full control room watch at all times, with main and secondary armament ready for instant use. You can man the fire control console until relieved, Major Swinton.”

“Open fire on anything suspicious, sir?” asked the Marine, cheerfully and hopefully.

“No,” Grimes told him. “You will not open fire unless you get direct orders from myself.”

“But, sir, we must make the natives respect us.”

“What natives? I sincerely hope there aren’t any on this island. In any case, there are other and better ways of gaining respect than killing people. Don’t forget that
we
are the aliens, that
we
have come dropping down on this planet without so much as a by-your-leave. And Dr. Brandt—I hope—is the expert on establishing friendly relations with indigenes.”