No World of Their Own (2 page)

“We did it!”

There she hung, a gigantic shield, belted with clouds, blazoned with continents, a single radiant star where the curving oceans focused sunlight. Langley's fingers shook as he got a radar reading. The error this time was negligible.

Rockets spumed fire, pressing them back into their seats, as he drove the vessel forward. Peggy, Peggy, Peggy, it was a song within him.

Was it a boy or a girl? He remembered, as if it were an hour ago, how they had tried to find a name; they weren't going to be caught flat-footed when the man brought the birth certificate around. Oh Peggy!

They entered the atmosphere, too eager to care about saving fuel with a braking ellipse, backing down on a jet of flame. The ship roared and thundered around them.

Presently they were gliding, on a long spiral which would take them halfway round the world before they landed. There was a dark whistle of cloven air outside.

Langley was too busy piloting to watch the view, but Blaustein, Matsumoto, and even Saris Hronna strained their eyes at the screens. It was the Holatan who spoke first: “Iss that the much by you talked of city New York?”

“No … we're over the Near East, I think.” Blaustein looked down to the night-wrapped surface and a twinkling cluster of light. “Which is it, anyway?”

“Hmm … damfino … never saw any city in this area big enough to show this high up without a telescope,” said Matsumoto. “Ankara? There must be unusually clear seeing tonight.”

The minutes ticked by. “That's the Alps,” said Blaustein. “See the moonlight on them? Only …” Suddenly, he shouted, “Bob, I know damn well there's no town that size
there!”

“God! Must be near as big as Chicago.” Matsumoto paused. When he spoke again, it was in a queer, strained tone: “Jim, did you get a close look at Earth as we came in?”

“More or less. Why?”

“It just now hits me. I didn't see any polar cap.”

“Huh? Why—why—”

“Think back. Did you? We were too excited to notice details, but I saw North America clear as I see you, and—I should have seen the arctic ice cap. I've seen it a million times from space, only there were just a few dark splotches there: islands, no snow at all.”

Silence. Then Blaustein said thickly: “Try the radio.”

They crossed Europe and nosed over the Atlantic, still slowing a velocity that made the cabin baking hot. Here and there, over the waste of waters, rose more jewels of light, floating cities where none had ever been.

Matsumoto turned the radio dials slowly. Words jumped at him, a gabble which made no sense at all. “What the devil?” he mumbled. “What language is that?”

“Not European, I can tell you,” said Blaustein. “Not even Russian. I know enough of that to identify … Oriental?”

“Not Chinese or Japanese. I'll try another band.”

The ship slanted over North America with the sunrise. They saw how the coastline had shrunk. Now and then Langley manipulated gyroscopes and rockets for control. He felt a cold bitterness in his mouth.

The unknown speech crackled on all frequencies. Down below, the land was green, huge rolling tracts of field and forest. Where were the cities and villages and farms, where were the roads, where was the world?

Without landmarks, Langley tried to find the New Mexico spacefield which was his home base. He was still high enough to get a wide general view through drifting clouds. He saw the Mississippi and then, far off, he thought he recognized the Platte, and oriented himself mechanically.

A city slid below. It was too remote to see in detail, but it was not like any city he had ever known. The New Mexico desert was turned green, seamed with irrigation canals.

“What's happened?” Blaustein said it like a man hit in the stomach. “What's happened? In God's name, what's happened?”

Something entered the field of view, a long black cigar shape, matching their speed with impossible ease. There was no sign of jets or rockets or propellers or … anything. It swooped close, thrice the length of the
Explorer,
and Langley saw flat gun turrets on it.

He thought briefly and wildly of invasions from space, monsters from the stars overrunning and remaking Earth in a single year of horror. Then a brief blue-white explosion that hurt his eyes snapped in front of the ship, and he felt a shiver of concussion.

“They shot across the bows,” he said in a dead voice. “We'd better land.”

Down below was a sprawling complex of buildings and open spaces; it seemed to be of concrete. Black flyers swarmed over it, and there were high walls around. Langley tilted the
Explorer
and fought her down to the surface.

When he cut the rockets, there was a ringing silence. Then he unbuckled himself and stood up.

He was a tall man, and as he stood there he gave an impression of grayness: gray uniform, gray eyes, black hair prematurely streaked with gray, a long hook-nosed face burned dark by the light of strange suns. And when he spoke, there was grayness in his tone.

“Come on. We'll have to go out and see what they want.”

II

Lord Brannoch dhu Crombar, Tertiary Admiral of the Fleet, High Noble of Thor, ambassador of the League of Alpha Centauri to the Solar Technate, did not look like a dignitary of any civilized power. He was gigantic, six and a half feet tall, so wide in the shoulders that he seemed almost squat. The yellow mane of a Thorian chieftain fell past ears in which jeweled rings glittered to the massive collarbone; the eyes were blue and merry under a tangled forest of brow, and the face was blunt and heavy and sun-browned, seamed with old scars. His lounging pajamas were of Centaurian cut, complete with trousers, and overly colorful; a diamond loop circled his throat. He was also known as a sportsman, hunter, duellist, a mighty lover and a roisterer with an unsurpassed knowledge of the dives on a dozen planets. The apartment which his enormous body seemed to fill was overcrowded with color, ornament, trophies, hardly a book-spool in sight.

All of these trappings fitted in well enough with his character, but they also maintained a camouflage for one of the shrewdest brains in the known universe.

It might have been observed that the drink in his hand as he relaxed on the balcony was not his home planet's rotgut but one of the better Venusian vintages, and that he sipped it with real appreciation. But there was no one to notice except four monsters in a tank, and they didn't care.

Morning sunlight flooded over him, gilding the airy spires and flexible bridgeways of Lora against a serene heaven. He was, as befitted his rank, high in the upper levels of the city. Its voice drifted to him in a whisper, the remote song of machines that were its heart and brain and nerve and muscle. At only one point in his visual range did the smooth harmony of metal and tinted plastic end, where the city dropped cliff-like four thousand feet to the surrounding parks. The few human figures abroad on the flanges and bridgeways were like ants, almost invisible at this distance. A service robot rolled past them, bound for some job too complex for a merely human slave.

Brannoch felt relaxed and peaceful. Things were going well. His sources of information were operating quietly and efficiently. Already he knew much about Sol which would be of value when the war started. He had bagged a dragon in Minister Tanarac's African preserve; he had won grandly the last time he visited Lunar Casino; he had bought a very satisfactory girl a few days ago; the last mail ship from Centauri had reported his estates on Freyja were yielding a bumper crop—of course, the news was more than four years old, but still welcome. Life could be worse.

The apologetic buzz of the robophone interrupted his reflections. Too lazy to get up, he steered the chair over to it. Someone who knew his special and highly unofficial number was calling, but that could be a lot of people. He thumbed the switch, and an unfamiliar face looked at him. The caller bowed ritually, covering his eyes, and said humbly: “Audience requested with you, my lord.”

“Now?” asked Brannoch.

“P-p-presently, my lord, when c-convenient.” The stutter would be taken for the normal nervousness of an underling in such an august presence, in case this secret line was tapped—which Brannoch knew very well it was. Actually, the pattern of repeated consonants was an identifying password. This was Varis t'u Hayem, a petty Minister and a captain in the Solar militechnic intelligence corps, dressed in civilian clothes and wearing a life-mask. He would not be reporting in person unless it was a matter of urgency. Brannoch led him through a routine of giving his assumed name and business, told him to come up; then he cut the circuit. Only then did he allow himself to frown.

Rising he made a careful check of the concealed roboguns and of the needier under his own tunic. It
could
be an attempt at assassination, if Chanthavar's counterspies had learned enough. Or it could—

He went swiftly over t'u Hayem's background, and a wry, half-pitying grin twisted his mouth. It was so easy, so terribly easy to break a man.

You met this proud ambitious aristocrat, whose only real fault was youth and inexperience, at a couple of receptions, drew him out—oh, simple, simple, with the dazzling glow of your own birth and rank behind you. Your agents in his corps got his psychorecord for you, and you decided he was promising material. So you cultivated him—not much, but even a little attention from the agent of a foreign power was overwhelming if you were a High Noble, an admiral and an ambassador. You pulled one or two wires for him. You introduced him to really top-flight company, gorgeously appareled nobles of every known state, their magnificent women, their cultivated conversation and splendid homes and rare wines. You gave him the idea that he was listening at the door to plans which would shake the stars.… Naturally he did some favors for you—nothing to violate his oath, just stretching a point here and there.

You took him to pleasure houses operated with real imagination. You got him gambling, and at first he won incredible sums. Then you moved in for the kill.

In a few days his fortune was gone, he was sunk a light-year down in debt, his superiors were getting suspicious of him because of his association with you, his creditors (who were your creatures, which he did not know) attached his property and wife—you had him. And for some three years, now, he had been your spy within his own corps, because only you and your organization propped him up, and because even a tiny illegality performed for you made it possible to blackmail him. Someday, if he gave you something really valuable, you might even buy his wife (with whom he was so foolish as to be in love) and give her back to him—lend her, at least, on a conditional basis.

Very easy. Brannoch had neither pleasure nor pain in making a tool out of what had been a man. It was part of his job; insofar as he had any feeling about his broken men, it was one of contempt that they should ever have been so vulnerable.

The outer door of the suite scanned t'u Hayem's fingers and retinae and opened for him. He entered and bowed with the proper formulas. Brannoch did not invite him to sit down. “Well?” he said.

“Most radiant lord, I have information which may be of interest to you. I thought I had best bring it personally.”

Brannoch waited. The pseudo-face before him twitched with an eagerness that some might have thought pathetic.

“My lord, I am as you know stationed at Mesko Field. The day before yesterday, a strange spaceship entered Earth's atmosphere and was made to land there.” T'u Hayem fumbled in his tunic and brought out a spool which he threaded into a scanner. His hands shook. “Here is a picture of it.”

The scanner threw a three-dimensional image above the table top. Brannoch whistled. “Stormblaze! What kind of a ship is that?”

“Incredibly archaic, my lord. See, they even use rockets—a uranium-fission pile for energy, reaction mass expelled as ions.”

Brannoch enlarged the image and studied it. “Hm, yes. Where is it from?”

“I don't know, my lord. We referred the question to the Technon itself—records division—and were told that the design is of the very earliest days of space travel, well before gravity control was discovered. Possibly from one of the oldest of the lost colonies.”

“Hm. Then the crew must be—have been—outlaws. I can't see explorers taking off knowing they wouldn't be back for perhaps thousands of years. What about the crew?”' Brannoch turned a knob, and the next image was of three humans in outlandish gray uniform, clean-shaven, hair cut short in the style of Solar Ministers. “That all?”

“No, my lord. If that were all, I wouldn't have considered the business so important. But there was a nonhuman with them, a race unknown to anyone including the records division. We got a picture, snapped hastily.”

The alien was shown running. It was a big beast: eight feet long including the thick tail, bipedal with a forward-crouching gait, two muscular arms ending in four-fingered hands. It could be seen to be male and presumably a mammal; at least it was covered with smooth mahogany fur. The head was lutrine: round, blunt-snouted, ears placed high, whiskers about the mouth and above the long yellow eyes.

“My lord,” said t'u Hayem in a near whisper, “they emerged and were put under arrest pending investigation. Suddenly the alien made a break for it. He's stronger than a human, trampled down three men in his path, moved faster than you would think. Anesthetic guns opened up on him—rather, they should have, but they didn't. They didn't go off! I snapped a shot at him with my hand blaster, and the circuit was dead—nothing happened. Several others did too. A small robot shell was fired after him—and crashed. A piloted scoutplane swooped low, but its guns didn't go off; the control circuits went dead, and it crashed too. The nearest gate was closed, but it opened for him as he approached it. One man close by focused a neural tracker on him as he went into the woods, but it didn't work till he was out of its range.