Federation World (5 page)

They were now in possession of the knowledge and ability to control and direct mechanisms of a complexity and power undreamed of by the people they had been on Earth-although they had still, their superior insisted, to acquire the experience and wisdom to use this power effectively. So they had waited and trained to an even finer pitch, wondering when, if ever, their first assignment would come.

Due to training commitments, their original classmates and one-time friends had gradually drawn away from them to disappear, two by two, in the directions of their chosen specialties. But there were compensations. As the training programs of Martin and Beth, the woman he had seen during that final visit to the examination and induction center back on Earth, began increasingly to overlap, and their friends to move away, Beth and he had drawn-or had they been forced?-closer.

It was a disturbing thought, particularly when, as now, it returned to trouble both of them at the same time. Martin slipped his arm around Beth's shoulders and drew her back into the relaxer which, as well as being sinfully soft, was set for one-quarter gee. But her arm and neck muscles were stiff with tension, and she was wearing her totally unnecessary spectacles, which was not a good sign.

"How much does that slimy, supercilious supervisor know about us?" she asked, so softly that she might have been speaking to herself. "Was a few hours with the interrogation robots at the induction center enough to tell it everything! And if it knows everything, how accurately can it predict our behavior? Have we any free will, any choices? More importantly, have you, had you, any choice at all?"

"We can always choose to fail the next test," Martin said, in an attempt to change the subject. "But it might well be that, in our situation, teacher knows best."

"It knows us well enough to know that we wouldn't deliberately fail a test," Beth said impatiently. "And you know what I mean. We had no choice, no competition, no chance to make comparisons. I know that you were, well, impressed by Kathy. She impressed hell out of all the men, she's gorgeous, dammit. If things had been different you might have preferred..."

Looking miserable, she left the sentence hanging.

Martin gave her shoulders another sympathetic squeeze, trying to draw her closer. But the warm, yielding, and normally responsive body had become that of a cold, fleshy mannequin with tension-frozen joints. He sighed, remembering that during their first meeting in the induction center so long ago, before he had even learned her name, he had decided that she was a lovely and highly intelligent young woman who took things much too seriously.

He had found no reason to change his mind about her when they met in the spacious living module occupied by the school's Earth-humans, or during recreation periods in the forests and lakes overlying that tremendous underground training complex. Fomalhaut Three provided an environment suited to the needs of many of the Galaxy's warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing races, and much of its training and large-scale simulation equipment was hi common use. But none of the trainees, including Martin, were allowed to make contact with a member of another species until they had graduated from the school.

He and Beth had met more and more frequently as their chosen specialties required them to share training simulations of increasing complexity, duration, and degrees of risk. She, who once had been responsible for the computer control of traffic in a small Earth city, and who was now able to direct energies and engines capable of changing the topography of a continent; and he, a cynical, discontented, one-time lecturer in zoology who, it seemed, was destined to do little else but talk. He shook his head and brought his mind back to the present time and problem.

"You're forgetting," he said quietly, "that the only one of us to impress Kathy was George. George with the muscles, and mustache, and the teeth. Did you fancy-"

"No," she said firmly. "Kathy is welcome to him."

"Besides," he went on, "they're both specializing in multi-environmental plant and animal husbandry. Fine, demanding, vitally important work, no doubt, especially if they want to stay inside the World, but it is still only fanning. Teaming up with a ship handler, the class's only trainee hypership captain, no less, is much more fun. For personal as well as professional reasons."

Beth did not smile as she turned her head to look at him, and her eyes were hidden by light reflection in her spectacles.

He went on. "It is quite possible that the supervisor knows our minds much better than we do, and that would include being able to predict what we are likely to do in any given situation. But what of it? That creature is hyperintelligent, not omniscient, and I think that its thought processes are just too alien for it to be able to influence us against our wills where anything so subtle as Earth-human emotional relationships are concerned. The decisions we made, and will make, are still our own, regardless of the fact that it probably knows about them in advance. The point I'm trying to make is that, had the supervisor given you more female competition by confronting me with a dozen, or a hundred, tall, dark-eyed, lovely women who know what I'm thinking almost before I do, the process would have taken much longer, and wasted a lot of our supervisor's precious training time, but ultimately I would have made the same choice."

He felt her relax, but not completely, as she allowed herself to settle into the backrest beside him.

"If I had been confronted with a hundred men.." she began.

"I was lucky you weren't," he said.

Irritably, she said, "How can I argue with you when you always say the right thing? But I keep forgetting that you're training as one of those devious-minded, smooth-talking specialists in First Contact who never stops practicing ..."

"This," he reminded her gently, "is not the first contact."

There was a small movement of her shoulder, and he felt her hand creep gently into his and grip the fingers tightly, and he knew that she, too, was remembering that first contact and all the tension and terror of the protracted, technological nightmare that had preceded it.

It had happened during one of their early shared training exercises, when they were still trying to familiarize themselves with what the supervisor, a being renowned for the magnitude of its understatements, referred to as the basic tools of the trade.

The tools of their trade...

Tool One, the hypership: the largest general-purpose vessel operated by the Galactics; just under half a mile in length, one-third that at its widest point, bristling with such an angular, metallic outgrowth of hyper-drive generator assemblies, normal-space drivers, tractor and pressor beam projectors, weather control machinery, and long- and short-range sensors that it was incapable of making anything but the most catastrophic of crash landings on a planetary surface. Internally it was packed with enough power generation equipment to satisfy the demands of one of the Galactic's most energy-hungry cities, as well as a small army of monitor and self-repair robots, fabrication modules capable of producing anything from a pair of boots to a medium-sized interplanetary space vessel, synthesizers for the crew's organic consumables, and, in executive charge of ail these systems, a computer which, to describe it as superhuman would have been to damn it with faint praise indeed. In spite of its virtual omniscience, the main computer was subservient to the wishes of its organic crew, although not always without argument.

This was one of the Galactics' standard-issue tools, varying from ship to ship only in the control interfaces, living quarters, medical support, and food and translation systems required by its organic occupants at the time.

Tool Two, the lander: a small, fast, low-level reconnaissance vessel and surface lander, with crew positions for two but capable of being controlled remotely by the mother ship. Designed as a secure base for the First Contact specialist, it carried the full spectrum of communications equipment and, in the event of the contact going sour, its meteorite screen was also capable of protecting the occupant from ground or air attack by anything short of nuclear weapons.

Tool Three, the protector: a small, surface observation vehicle capable of operating within the most hostile of environments while enabling its crew to communicate with any intelligent inhabitants who might be present. For defense it relied principally on high mobility, but in the event of it encountering a threat from which it could not run away and which threatened the life of an organic occupant, it had power sufficient for a short-range matter transmission link with either the lander or the hyper-ship.

The other tools were much smaller, more specialized, and tailored to the needs of the Earth-human life-form. These included mobile, self-powered protective envelopes, proof against any hostile environment they were likely to encounter; a variety of nonlethal or psychological weaponry; and a two-way translator terminal so small that it could be disguised as a piece of ear or neck jewelry, and possessing a silent voice-bypass facility which enabled the contacter to hold simultaneous conversation with the mother ship without the risk of giving offense to an alien contactee.

But in that first major test, given without prior warning during the start of an otherwise routine training exercise to power-up a cold lander, the majority of those increasingly familiar tools were deliberately withdrawn from use.

It was a simulated, near-catastrophic malfunction which had opened the hypership to space and taken out the on-board power generation and all of the systems controlled by the main computer. They protested, reminding the supervisor that they had been taught that the hypership's design philosophy made such an event impossible. But they were told that it was a simulated and not a real event, that it was designed to test, under conditions of extreme stress, their suitability for their chosen specialties, and that if they put into practice everything they had been taught up until that time, they should be able to survive the test without serious damage or life termination.

Within seconds of the first malfunction alarm, the lander's hull sensors reacted automatically to the loss of external pressure and simulated radiation build-up by sealing all entry and inspection ports, effectively trapping them in a ship within a ship.

Considering then- level of technological ignorance at the time, it was obvious that they could not do anything about the condition of the distressed hypership, so that the most that was expected of them was to act as they would have done had the situation been real, and call for help.

But the distress beacon was mounted outside the hypership’s hull, and they were trapped inside a lander whose power cells and consumables were all but depleted. A hurried inventory showed that they had enough energy to maintain an air supply for two people of thirty-six hours, provided they remained at rest and did not use the available power for light, heat, artificial gravity, or communication with anyone or anything outside the lander.

Plainly they had to breathe less, but communication was vital.

The main computer was down, and with it all of the mother ship's remote control systems. Through the crackle of simulated radiation interference, Beth was able to make intermittent contact with the three, self-powered repair robots assigned to the lander dock area. The robots were capable of performing a variety of delicate, precise, and quite complex tasks, she told Martin, provided they were given equally precise and complex instructions. Being in-organic and capable of operating in an airless, radioactive environment, it was possible for them to be given directions for finding and operating the manual release for the distress beacon-if she could remember the complicated internal geography of the mother ship and none of the different paths she programmed them to follow were blocked by simulated wreckage. But the first two robots died on her long before reaching their objective.

Beth complained angrily that the stupid things had done what they were told, not what she wanted them to do, and began the even more precise and careful instruction of the third and last one.

While she was working, Martin opened the seal between the flight deck and lock chamber to allow maximum circulation of their remaining air. Then he detached the wide, one-piece padding from their control couches and tied the attachment straps together to form a makeshift sleeping bag which he anchored loosely beside the direct vision port. Since the heating had been turned off, it was becoming colder by the minute-doubtless the rate of heat dissipation into space was being accelerated for the purposes of the test. He checked the food storage locker again, finding only two water bulbs and the characteristic shape of a self-warming food container, but the glow coming from their only working communicator screen was too dim to let him read the label.