Silence.
Fenner's voice came through it, thin and sharp with panic. "Did you hear that, Kirby? Did you hear what it said?"
Kirby said, "Yes, I heard." The sunlight was hot on the back of his neck. Under his feet were bruised grasses and a species of purple wildflower. They had a bittersweet, greenish smell. He did not feel anything much inside, except the automatic knotting up of the central ganglion. What were you supposed to feel at a moment like this?
Without knowing that he was going to do it, he shouted, "They couldn't let us alone, could they? All that distance away, but they couldn't let us alone!"
". . . did it mean?" Krejewski was saying. "What kind of an element? An element like uranium, or weather, or like 'elements of the Fleet,' or—" He let his voice fade out. It did not sound like his voice.
Unidentified element. Unidentified Thing that sees through atoms, that can comprehend in toto a mechanism so complex that it requires a team of experts to comprehend even its apparent parts. It had contact with RSS-1. And RSS-1 must have recorded it somewhere in the mass of information brought back from its voyage.
Untenable for human life. And so this was how it ended. This, after triumph, was the feel and the taste and the smell of defeat.
Fenner's voice, insistent, shrill, "Could that be true? We made all the tests and nothing showed up. Could there be something here that our tests didn't show?"
MacLeod said slowly, "Our data were incomplete. Only a few top Government men ever saw the full report, and only scraps of it were smuggled out. We just assumed—" He stared at Kirby, stricken with guilt and fear. "All those women and kids. Kirby, what have we done?"
Blind rage, violent, sudden, childishly denying reason. "I don't believe it! I would not believe the goddam Government on oath!"
But was it denying reason? There was a discrepancy here, a lack of logic. "Listen, they tried to kill us themselves, didn't they? They sent the RSS-1 after us with torpedoes, didn't they?"
There was only one answer to that. "Yes."
"All right. Now why are they suddenly so all-fired anxious to save our lives that they'd fit out another R-ship and sent it all the way out here to rescue us from an 'unidentified' danger? You answer me that."
They could not.
"Well, I can," Kirby said, rushing ahead as though by sheer savagery he could make the words be true. "It's a trap. Look, we broke the unbreakable law. We upset their whole system of government by proving that their R-ships weren't invincible, that men could still defy them and go anywhere they wanted to. They tried to kill us—a legal execution. It didn't work, and we proved to the Solar System that space was still free. But they can't let it stay proved or their whole concept of government will collapse. So they've tried a different way."
"You think," said Krejewski, "that the idea is to get us all together in this second R-ship and then blow it up or something?"
Kirby considered that. "I doubt it. It wouldn't be effective. Don't you get the picture? We left in an old manned rocket and a blaze of glory. We come back humbly in an R-ship, rescued by the kind Government from the consequences of our own folly. Now the Government is the hero and we're chumps, and all the restive souls who are at this moment trying to break out and follow us will have second thoughts, and nobody will ever try star-voyaging again, at least not in this era."
They thought that over, and the two suns blazed on Kirby's head and set a fire in it. When MacLeod said slowly, "It's your opinion, then, that the message is no more than a lie to frighten us into going home?", Kirby hesitated only a fractional second before he said, "Yes."
Damn the thing that can see inside of atoms. Damn it, and ignore it. It hasn't hurt anybody yet. Maybe it never will. And maybe Shari only dreamed it anyway.
"Fenner," he said into the radio. "Don't give our position, no matter how loud anybody screams at you. We're coming back."
"Fat lot of good that'll do," said Fenner sourly, and signed off. Kirby turned around. "Let's get the others," he said to MacLeod and Krejewski. He started back toward the forest. He was shaking and dizzy, and he walked fast because if he did not he would have to stop and be sick.
RSS-2. Robot Star Ship Two. They must, he thought, have worked overtime and Sundays to fit one up so fast. But they would. They would have to. They had had a complete monopoly on space for too long to let it be broken without a struggle by a bunch of undistinguished people like themselves. There must be millions of other undistinguished people who, like them, were tired of living like children, constantly guarded and supervised for their own good. And if enough of them asserted their right to a universe with no manmade fences to close it off, the present government and its policy of stagnation-for-profit—the government's profit through the trade and passenger monopoly of the robot ships—would be finished.
Perhaps enough people had already rebelled so that merely destroying the people of the Lucy DavenportAwas no longer enough. They had now to be discredited, and this was the way to do it.
And now, thought Kirby, I'm caught between two of them—another R-ship, and It, the mountain-with-out-a-face.
He said aloud, "They won't get away with it."
MacLeod and Krejewski stopped talking between themselves and looked at him.
"I'm going to find out," Kirby said.
"Find out what?" asked MacLeod.
"Whether this thing is dangerous to human life."
"What thing, though? That's the trouble. What, and where, and how do you go about finding it?"
They looked around them, and the world had grown enormous and far-spreading, and full of sinister mysteries.
They walked in among the trees to the place where they had left the others. A couple of them were chopping clumsily at a ten-foot-thick tree bole, not making much headway. In three different places, three separate groups of men were hunkered down around the three chainsaws, poking at them.
Kirby said bluntly, "Pack up. We've got to go back."
"Might as well," said a big man named Hanawalt. "We can't do much with the axes alone, we aren't good enough. And the chainsaws won't work."
"What do you mean, they won't work?" Krejewski demanded. "They worked all right day before yesterday. I tested them myself."
"They don't work now," said Hanawalt. "Nothing wrong with 'em. They just don't work."
"That's crazy."
"So," said MacLeod, "was the radio."
"We can worry about that later," Kirby said, and knocked radios and chainsaws out of their heads with the news of the oncoming R-ship. They took it first in a stunned silence, and then with such an outburst of talk and questions, curses and speculation that Kirby had all he could do to get them loaded up and ready to move. And then the sound and the fury died away and there was only the quiet of disheartened and discouraged men.
"A hell of a thing," said Wilson. "All this way, all the years we put in."
"We're not licked yet," said Kirby, and swung the long saw over his shoulders again.
Wilson glanced at him and asked, "Aren't we?"
Kirby turned away from him. "Everybody ready?" They were lined up in a straggling line and their thoughts were plain on their faces. They were not good thoughts. Hanawalt muttered, "I hate to think what my wife is going to say to me."
Somebody else said, "We're all in the same boat." Which made it no better.
Kirby kicked irritably at a blanket roll and an axe left lying on the ground, and demanded to know who they belonged to. "No need to start throwing away good equipment just because you're scared."
A few of them answered him back rather nastily, and it developed that the blanket roll did not belong to anybody. Each man had his full load.
The feeling of sickness in Kirby's middle became almost unbearable. He asked, "Who's missing?"
After a moment or two, they came up with a name.
"Joe Marapese."
"Oh, lord," said Kirby. "All right, let's find him."
They fanned out, yelling, working in a widening circle until Kirby was afraid they would get out of touch with each other and be pulled them in, lest he lose some more. There was no Joe Marapese. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, no tracks, human or otherwise. There had not been, that anyone could remember, even the smallest sound.
"Wandered off exploring," Kirby said. He repeated it with a harsh note of firmness. "We can't wait all day for him." He scribbled a note and left it on Marapese's blanket. "He can catch up with us."
The others did not look happy about it, but they did not protest. All at once they seemed very anxious to get out of the forest. Kirby did not try to hold them back.
The plain was wide and empty. They plodded across it, not talking much. First one sun went down, and then the other, and they went on through the twilight and into darkness. It was Kirby who first saw the black hull of the Lucy B. Davenport against the sky, with the circle of fires around her base like a twinkling mockery of stars. And he thought, They are mine, these people. I brought them here, and I won't let them go. I won't let it all be made for nothing!
Then in a few minutes, when they were closer, the wives of the men came running out to meet them, and Kirby thought, this time I won't have much to say about it.
He left them to look for Shari. She was waiting, as she always did, apart from the others. Even in the dusk outside the firelight her face looked strained, and when she took his hands her fingers were cold, holding his too tightly.
He nodded toward the women. "Have they been like that all day?"
"Yes. But this morning, when they first heard the message—oh, Kirby! It was as if they all sat in a courtroom and heard the death sentence pronounced on them and everyone they love. They have locked up all the children in the ship, because they think now this world is somehow poisoned."
"That's what's going to beat us." said Kirby somberly. "Panic. The Government counted on that, of course. Men and women may be brave about their lives, but not the lives of their mates and especially not their children. That's the Government's major weapon, and I don't think they'll need another one. Shari, we lost a man today."
She looked at him, startled. "Not killed? I tried to follow you, but there were so many minds, so many emotions—"
"He just disappeared. Young Marapese. Shari, will you see if you can find him? I want to know if he's still alive."
Marapese's folks would be interested in knowing, too.
Shari walked away from the fires, out into the darkness, away from the people. She said, "You should have taken me with you. I could only get a confusion of things. It was thinking toward you this time, not toward the ship. What did it do?"
"Jammed the radio. Stopped the chainsaws from working, and don't ask me how, but there's no other explanation. Now I want to know—did it take young Marapese?"
"I'll try." She shut her eyes and was silent for several minutes. Then she said, "I cannot hear him. If he is alive, he is very far away."
He asked her, "Is the message true?"
She answered, as he had known she would, "I do not know."
"I want to find out. I'd like your help, Shari, but this time you don't have to give it. This time the R-ship is coming, not to kill you, but to take you back. You have a free choice."
She made a small sound that might have been laughter, except that it was a little too sharply barbed. "Where you are concerned, my choice is never free."
"I tried to make you stay at home."
"And I came. And I will help."
He put his arm around her and walked with her back to the ship. The people had fallen quiet, except for a few hushed sobs. And then, high and unearthly, a woman shrieked.
"There's a light on the plain—something's out there!"