The Long Result
John Brunner
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain's oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language's finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
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Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime.
With the fairy-tales of science, and the long result of Time.
TENNYSON:
Locksley Hall
The crisis broke on a morning when I was late for work. As I crossed the entrance foyer of the Bureau of Cultural Relations the calendar clock on the far wall was showing 0938 Zone 7 – Thursday, 30th February.
There was nothing in itself so wrong about that. In spite of the unkind cracks people circulated about the Bureau of
Poor
Relations, I’d always felt I was doing one of the most fruitful jobs I could have hoped to find, and I enjoyed it enough not to steal time off, so this late arrival was a rare event. Still more to the point, I’d been doing something with which nobody could argue – not even Tinescu, the Chief of Bureau, in one of his peppery early-morning moods.
At least… that was what I thought as I made my way up in the elevator, sublimely unaware of the mess into which I was about to be pitchforked.
I opened the door of my office. On the door, neat Anglic script said:
ROALD VINCENT
Assistant
OUT
That last word amended itself to read
IN
as the secretary built into my desk recognized me. I sat down and asked what I had on hand from yesterday.
My own voice came back at me from the tapes: ‘Pass 61 Cygni 19k for final assay by Integration. Lunch at the Kingdom with Patricia. Call Micky Torres between fourteen and
sixteen regarding Epsilon Eridani 8c. The revised findings on it should be through by morning – if they aren’t, chase Tomas.’
A good plain day’s work. I was about to activate the first job, when I realized the secretary was playing blank tape and hissing slightly. Something else was on file. Abruptly Tinescu’s voice rang out.
‘Roald, get the hell up to my office the moment you arrive!’
Blazes. Another of his morning moods.
I sighed, told the secretary to go dormant again, and was about to obey the chief’s order when the door slid open, and there was Jacky Demba looking uncharacteristically sour.
‘You got here, did you?’ he said, passing his mahogany-coloured hand through the tight crisp curls on his long head. Tinescu’s been scouring the Bureau for you this past half-hour.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Just got it off my tapes. What’s it about, and why should he bother you?’
‘Called down a minute ago to say would I check that you hadn’t already come in and forgotten to signal it. I should hurry along before he burns through the floor.’
And he was gone back to his own office before I had time to ask for further details.
So I went up to see Tinescu, blithely thinking this was one of the usual minor flaps which I sometimes suspected Tinescu of generating in order to compensate for the lowly status the Bureau enjoyed among the other interstellar Relations organizations and enhance his sense of self-importance. I got the first inkling I was wrong when I entered the room and heard a ringing voice boom from the outside phone. The little picture screen was turned away from the door, of course, towards Tinescu, but I didn’t have to see the face to know he was talking to Giuseppe Capra, the Minister for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs.
Coincidence? Or was this connected with the matter he’d been chasing me for? I devoutly hoped it was coincidence; I had no special ambition to get involved with problems at Ministerial level.
But the conversation was just ending, and all I caught to serve me as a clue was Capra’s final furious blast – ‘You’d better handle it right, or those Starhomers will be laughing behind their hands at us for the next generation!’
That gave me a few moments of misguided relief. My department was primarily concerned with Viridis, not with Starhome, so I assumed that one would fall in somebody else’s lap. I was extremely wrong.
Tinescu shut off the phone and fixed me with a glare. Immediately I said, I’m sorry to be late, Chief. But there was a call for blood donors because of the rocket crash, and they needed my group.’
Tinescu had been framing a blast at me. What I said took the fuel out of his jets. Last night’s rocket crash – one of the trans-Pacific expresses had lost its engines on take-off — had shocked everybody, and appeals for donors and emergency nursing staff had been on all the newscasts. In an age when human life-expectancy topped a hundred and ten, it wasn’t lightly to be thrown away.
‘Why the hell didn’t you at least call your secretary?’ he growled finally, shaking back his mane of lank black hair. ‘It was a miracle we got this stay of execution … Ach!’
I didn’t ask what the phrase was supposed to imply. I was used to him dramatizing every minor upset into a full-blown interstellar crisis. I said, ‘I didn’t know I was going to be so badly delayed. But I stopped to talk to the extraterrestrial who was on board.’
‘What?’
Tinescu jolted upright. ‘Who?’
That really astonished me. I said blankly, ‘You mean you weren’t, told?’
‘Listen, since before midnight last night I’ve had my hands full of something else altogether! Who was it?’
‘Not one of ours, fortunately. A Regulan – a private visitor.’ Tinescu relaxed visibly; Regulans were about the toughest life-form conceivable, and a rocket crash wasn’t likely to damage one. I thought I’d better – well – have a few tactful words with him, see if he was angry at what happened. But he seemed not to be. What’s more, he’s done some good for Regulan-human relations – the rescue teams were full of praise for the way he helped to bring out the casualties.’
Tinescu told his desk to make a memo about that for later reference. Half-way through, he glanced up.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Anovel.’
‘Okay.’ He leaned back on completing the memo, and fixed me with a beady glare. ‘Well! You know who I was talking to when you came in?’
‘The Minister, wasn’t it?’
‘Right.’ The attention light of the phone came on; he spared a moment to bestow some round curses on it in archaic Rumanian and set the secretary to record. ‘Anybody told you about a Starhomer ship due to ground this morning?’
I searched memory and shook my head. ‘Normally I’d hear if it concerned my department —’
‘Normally!’ Tinescu banged a fist down on the squat plastic bulk of the addresser on his desk; for the first time I noticed its calculator-like keyboard was brand-new, contrasting with the worn air of everything else in the room. ‘It
does
concern you, like everyone else on this weary old planet! Only the addresser threw the memo I sent you into the wrong channel, and it wound up in Casley’s office, and he’s on furlough, and – ah, to hell. It’s happened now and we shall just have to pick up the pieces.’ He shot a fierce
glance at his watch. ‘Roald, what do you know about the Tau Cetians?
‘Not much.’ I frowned. This isn’t my line, strictly —’
‘Blazes, I’m only the Chief of Bureau! I know what’s your line and what isn’t! Answer my question, how about that?’
I recognized the danger signs: Tinescu was getting sarcastic, and that meant this was a crisis-for-real, not a crisis-to-shake-up. Baldly I summarized my knowledge in this area.
‘They’re the first daughter contact. In other words, they weren’t contacted by an expedition from Earth, but by one from Starhome – Epsilon Eridani. So far there’s been no direct contact between us and them. I’ve seen a reference somewhere to the establishment of a mission on their planet, and I guess it won’t be long now before we have a delegation of them here, too.’
‘You’re
so
right,’ Tinescu said sweetly. ‘To be exact, it will be around lunch-time.’
“What”?
‘Listen hard, because if we foul this one up the consequences will – now
I’m
wasting time!’ Another look at his watch. ‘Roald, at about twenty-three hours last night, this Starhomer ship broached normal for Earth. The captain calls through for a landing pattern, receives it immediately – they’d had the courtesy to notify us the ship was due, at least – and then says, “By the way, I guess I ought to warn you that we have a delegation of Tau Cetians on board and you may have to make some special arrangements to welcome them.”’
‘But this is absurd!’ I was half out of my chair.
‘Maybe. Or maybe the Starhomers just like the idea of making us run around in little circles. But this isn’t the half of it. The Starhomers have done their best to tackle the Tau Cetians by themselves, because of the way they feel about
Earth – “anything you can do I can do better”, as you might put it. So they’ve done all the things we usually do, like assigning a courier to the delegation and so forth, but they just aren’t
up
to it.’ Sweat was beginning to shine on his forehead. ‘They’re technicians, primarily. They don’t have a Bureau of Cultural Relations, they don’t have enough trained interracial psychologists, they don’t have
any
of the basic staffs and disciplines we use. And though the captain of that ship only confessed it very grudgingly, we’re sure beyond a doubt that the Tau Cetians have proved more than their courier can handle.’
‘Fast metabolism, aren’t they?’ Another snippet about Tau Cetians jumped up in memory.
‘Very fast. Chlorine-iodine breathers with a subjective time-rate of one point three – a third again as fast as ours and nearly as fast as that of a Regulan breathing fluorine… Blazes! You can get all that off the file – I slapped an imperative-reserve on it for you.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Chief, why me? I’ve hardly done any alien contact work —’