First Command (45 page)

There was no doubt that 1717 III was inhabited. The people of 1717 III had achieved, it seemed certain, some kind of industrial civilization. But until an actual landing was made little could be known about them, although Flannery was doing his best to pick up information. He said to Grimes, who had taken to haunting the PCO’s squalid office, “T’is like the roarin’ o’ the crowd at a football game, Captain. Niver a single voice that ye can make out what it’s sayin’ . . . just jabber, jabber, jabber. Oh, there’s a power o’ people down there all right, an’ they’re after thinkin’ what people always do be thinkin’—that it’s too hot, or too cold, or that it’s almost dinnertime, or that it’s a dreadful long time atween drinks. Which reminds me—” He reached for a full bulb of whiskey. “An’ how long are ye keepin’ us in free fall, Captain? I mislike these baby’s feedin’ bottles.”

Grimes ignored this. “But are they thinking in Standard English?” he demanded. “Or in any other human language?”

“Now ye’re askin’. An’ the answer is—I don’t know. Trouble is, there’s niver a
real
telepath among the bunch of ‘em. If there was, he’d be comin’ in loud and clear at this range, and I’d be able to tell ye for sure.” Flannery grinned. “Am I to take it that the opposition hasn’t brought ye any joy? That the bould Sparkses—bad cess to ‘em!—haven’t been able to raise anythin’ on their heathenish contraptions?”

“You know damn well they haven’t!” huffed Grimes. “We weren’t expecting anything on the Carlotti—but there’s been nothing on the NST either, nothing but static.”

“So ye haven’t found a Lost Colony after all, Captain. But ye’ve discovered a new world with new people. An’ isn’t that better?”

“A new world? How do you make that out?”

“A Lost Colony’d be makin’ its start with all the books an’ machinery an’ know-how aboard the ship, wouldn’t it? ‘Less they went all the way back to the Stone Age they’d be keepin’ the technology they started with, an’ improvin’ on it.”

“Mphm. But perhaps, for some reason, our friends down there prefer landlines to radio.”

“Ye’ve somethin’ there, Captain. But—there’s altogether too many o’ the bastards. That world has a powerful big population. Could the crew an’ passengers o’ just
one
ship—one flyin’ fridge, perhaps, or one o’ the lodejammers still not accounted for—have done so well, even if they bred like rabbits? Historically speakin’, the Deep Freeze ships o’ the First Expansion were only yesterday, an’ the Second Expansion was no more than a dog watch ago.”

“But you forget,” Grimes told him, “that the later Deep Freeze ships’, and
all
the lodejammers, carried big stocks of fertilized ova, together with the incubating machinery. One ship would have the capability to populate a small—or not so small—continent within a few decades after the first landing.”

“Ye’ve almost convinced me, Captain. But I can’t pick up any clear thinkin’ at all, at all. All I can tell ye is that
they—
whoever or whatever
they
are—are mammals, an’ have two sexes an’ a few o’ the in-betweens, an’ that most of ‘em are runnin’ hard to keep up in some sort o’ rat race . . . like us. But
how
like? Now ye’re askin’, an’ I can’t tell ye. Yet.”

“So we just have to wait and see,” said Grimes, getting up to return to the control room.

The planet 1717 III loomed huge through the planetward viewports, a great island in the sky along the shores of which
Discovery
was coasting. Like all prudent explorers in Man’s past Grimes was keeping well out from the land until he knew more of what awaited him there. Like his illustrious predecessors he would send in his small boats to make the first contact—but, unlike them, he would not be obliged to hazard the lives of any of his crew when he did so.

“Number one probe ready,” reported Brabham.

“Thank you,” said Grimes.

He glanced around the control room. Tangye was seated at the console, with its array of instruments, from which the probe would be operated. Brandt was looking on, obviously sneering inwardly at the amateurishly unscientific efforts of the spacemen. The officer of the watch was trying to look busy—although, in these circumstances, there was very little for him to do. The radio officers were hunting up and down the frequencies on the NST transceiver, bringing in nothing but an occasional burst of static.

“Launch the probe, sir?” asked Brabham.

“I’ll just check with. Mr. Tangye first, Number One.” Then, to the navigator, “You know the drill, pilot?”

“Yes, sir. Keep the probe directly below the ship to begin with. Bring it down slowly through the atmosphere. The usual sampling. Maintain position relative to the ship unless instructed otherwise.”

“Good. Launch.”

“Launch, sir.”

The muffled rattle of the probe’s inertial drive was distinctly audible as, decks away below and aft, it nosed out of its bay. It would not have been heard had
Discovery’s
own engines been running, it was little more than a toy, but the big ship, in orbit, was falling free. Needles on the gauges of Tangye’s console jerked and quivered, the traces in cathode ray tubes began their sinuous flickering; but as yet there was nothing to be seen on the big television screen tuned to the probe’s transmitter that could not be better observed from the viewports.

“Commander Grimes,” said Brandt, “I know that you are in charge, but might I ask why you are not adhering to standard procedure for a first landing?”

“What do you mean, Dr. Brandt?”

“Aren’t first landings supposed to be made at dawn? That tin spy of yours will be dropping down from the noon sky, in the broadest daylight possible.”

“And anybody looking straight up,” said Grimes, “will be dazzled by the sun. The real reason for a dawn landing—a manned landing, that is—is so that the crew has a full day to make their initial explorations. That does not apply in this case.”

“Oh. This, I take it then, is yet another example of your famous playing by ear.”

“You could put it that way,” said Grimes coldly.

Shuffling in his magnetic-soled shoes, he went to stand behind Tangye. Looking at the array of instruments, he saw that the probe had descended into an appreciable atmosphere and that friction was beginning to heat its skin. He said, “Careful, pilot. We don’t want to burn the thing up.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Clouds on the screen—normal enough high cirrus.

More clouds below the probe—an insubstantial but solid-seeming mountainscape of cumulus. A break in the cloud-floor, a rift, a wide chasm, and through it the view of a vast plain, and cutting across it a straight ribbon, silver-gleaming against the greens and browns of the land.

“Oxygen . . . nitrogen . . . carbon dioxide . . .” Tangye was reciting as he watched the indicators on the console.

“Good,” murmured Grimes. Then, “Never mind the analysis for now. It’s all being recorded. Watch the screen. Bring the probe down to that. . . canal.”

“How do you know it’s not a road or a railway?” asked Brandt.

“I don’t. But it
looks
like water.”

The probe was now losing altitude fast, plunging down through the rift in the clouds, dropping below the ceiling. Beneath it spread the great plain, the browns and yellows and greens of it now seen to be in regular patterns—crops as yet unripe, crops ready for harvesting, crops harvested? There were roads between the fields, not as distinct as the canal, but definite enough. There was motion—dark cloud shadows drifting with the wind, a ripple over the fields that subtly and continuously changed and shifted the intensities of light and shade and color. And there was other motion, obviously not natural—a tiny black object that crawled like a beetle along the straight line of the canal, trailing a plume of white smoke or steam.

“Home on that boat,” ordered Grimes.

“That. . .
boat,
sir?”

“That thing on the canal.” Grimes could not resist a little sarcasm. “The word ‘boat,’ Mr. Tangye, was used long before it was applied to the small craft carried by spaceships. Home on the boat.”

“Very good, sir,” responded Tangye sulkily.

As the probe descended, details of the boat could be make out. It was a barge, self-propelled, with its foredeck practically all one long hatch, with a wheelhouse-cum-accommodation-block aft, just forward of the smoking stovepipe funnel. Suddenly a head appeared at one of the open wheelhouse windows, looking all around, finally staring upward. That was the main drawback of the probes, thought Grimes, With their inertial drive-units running they were such noisy little brutes. He could imagine the bewilderment of the bargemen when they heard the strange clattering in the sky, louder than the steady thumping of their own engines, when they looked up to see the silvery flying torpedo with its spiky efflorescence of antennae.

The crew member who had looked up withdrew his head suddenly, but not before those in
Discovery’s
control room had learned that he was most definitely nonhuman. The neck was too long, too thin. The eyes were huge and round. There was no nose, although there was a single nostril slit. The mouth was a pouting, fleshy-lipped circle. The skin was a dark olive-green. The huge ears were even more prominent than Grimes’s own.

The water under the stern of the barge—which, until now, had been leaving only a slight wake—boiled into white foam as the revolutions of the screw were suddenly increased. Obviously the canal vessel was putting on a burst of speed to try to escape from the thing in the sky. It could not, of course; Tangye, with a slight adjustment to the probe’s remote controls, kept pace easily.

“No need to frighten them to death,” said Grimes. “Make it look as though you’re abandoning the chase.”

But it was too late. The barge sheered in toward the bank and the blunt stem gouged deeply into the soft soil, the threshing screw keeping it firmly embedded. The wheelhouse erupted beings; seen from the back they looked more human than otherwise. They ran along the foredeck, jumped ashore from the bows, scurried, with their long arms flailing wildly, toward the shelter of a clump of trees.

“Follow them, sir?” asked Tangye.

“No. But we might as well have a close look at the barge, now. Bring the probe down low over the foredeck.”

Steel or iron construction,
noted Grimes as the probe moved slowly from forward to aft.
Riveted plates . . . no
welding. Wooden hatch boards, as like as not, under a canvas—or something like canvas—hatch cover.

He said, “Let’s have a look in the wheelhouse, pilot. Try not to break any windows.”

“Very good, sir.”

It was not, strictly speaking, a wheelhouse, as steering was done by a tiller, not a wheel. There was, however, what looked like a binnacle, although it was not possible to see, from outside, what sort of compass it housed. There was a voicepipe—for communication with the engine room? Probably.

Grimes then had Tangye bring the probe to what had to be the engine room skylight, abaft the funnel. Unfortunately both flaps were down, and secured somehow from below so that it was impossible for the probe’s working arms to lift them.

“Well,” commented Grimes at last, “we have a fair idea of the stage their technology has reached. But it’s odd, all the same. People capable of building and operating a quite sophisticated surface craft shouldn’t bolt like rabbits at the mere sight of a strange machine in the sky.”

“Unless,” sneered Brandt, “other blundering spacemen have made landings on this world and endeared themselves to the natives.”

“I don’t think so, Doctor,” Grimes told him. “Our intelligence service, with all its faults, is quite efficient. If any human ships had made landings on this planet we should have known. And the same would apply in the case of nonhuman spacefarers, such as the Shaara and the Hallicheki. Mphm. Could it be, do you think that they have reason to fear flying machines that do not bear their own
national
colors? Mightn’t there be a war in progress, or a state of strained relations liable to blow up into a war at any moment?”

Brandt laughed nastily. “And wouldn’t that be right up your alley, Commander Grimes? Gives you a chance to make a snap decision as to who are the goodies and who the baddies before taking sides. I’ve been warned about that unfortunate propensity of yours.”

“Have you?” asked Grimes coldly. Then, to Tangye, “Carry on along the canal until you come to the nearest town or city. Then we’ll see what happens.”

Chapter 16

Swiftly along the canal
skimmed the probe, obedient to Tangye’s control. It hovered for a while over a suspension bridge—an affair of squat stone pylons and heavy chain cables—and turned its cameras on to a steam railway train that was crossing the canal. The locomotive was high-stacked, big-wheeled, belching steam, smoke, and sparks, towing a dozen tarpaulin-covered freight cars. The engine crew did not look up at the noisy machine in the sky; as was made evident by the probe’s audio pickups their own machinery was making more than enough racket to drown out any extraneous mechanical sounds.

The train chuffed and rattled away serenely into the distance, and Grimes debated with himself whether or not to follow it—it had to be going somewhere—or to carry on along the canal. He ordered Tangye to lift the probe and to make an all-around scan of the horizon. At a mere two kilometers of altitude a city came into full view, on the canal, whereas the railway line, in both directions, lost itself in ranges of low hills. The choice was obvious.

He ordered the navigator to reduce altitude. From too great a height it is almost impossible to get any idea of architectural details; any major center of habitation is no more than a pattern of streets and squares and parks. It was not long before the city appeared again on the screen—a huddle of towers, great and small, on the horizon, reflected by the gleaming straight edge of the canal. It was like an assemblage of child’s building bricks—upended cylinders and rectangular blocks, crowned with hemispheres or broad-based cones. The sun came out from behind the clouds and the metropolis glowed with muted color—yellows and browns and russet reds. Without this accident of mellow light striking upon and reflected from surfaces of contrasting materials the town would have seemed formidable, ugly, even—but for these moments at least it displayed an alien beauty of its own.