EINSTEIN WAS THEIR MODEL-
MACHIAVELLI THEIR GUIDE
When the Order of Planetary Engineers sent
Hall Davenant to Ganymede for a terraforming survey,
they knew that the job on the airless, frigid Jovian moon would be tough.
Changing it to resemble Earth—with fertile land, water, and good air—was the
biggest and most important planet conversion job ever attempted by the
Engineers.
But they hadn't counted on the already too Earthlike behavior of the Ganymede colonists, who had never
altered the ancient Earth-born habits of intrigue, bigotry, and double-died
treachery.
Turn this book over for second
complete novel
CAST
OF CHARACTERS
Hall Davenant
He
found nuclear physics simpler than understanding the people around him!
Lyell
His mistake was in being too civilized.
Thorval Kruse
Deep thought was never his strongest feature.
Angel-Three Garson
On his planet he was an Angel; on ours he'd be a Devil.
Cine-Four Halleck
Someone
else pulled the strings on this human puppet, until one day they were cut.
Roberts-John
He sat like a mole waiting for the
executioner.
THE SNOWS OF GANYMEDE
by
POUL ANDERSON
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.
the
snows of ganymede
Copyright ©, 1958, by Ace
Books, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Magazine version copyright, 1954, by Better
Publications, Inc.
war of the wing-men
Copyright ©, 1958, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
Three
dead men walked across the
face of hell. Their feet groped past frozen rock, now and then they stumbled in
the wan light, and always they heard the thin, bitter mumble of wind and felt
the cold gnawing at their flesh. Around them there was death, naked stone
reaching for a cruel sky of stars, a lean, poisonous whirl of snow which was
not snow, that whipped about them and then lay still
to crunch under their tread. Jupiter was low in the south, a great shield which
glowed amber.
They
had been walking for a long time now, it seemed like forever, and ahead of them
was nothing but another endlessness of walking. Speech had died within them.
Their feet were numbed clods which rose and struck the ground and rose again.
There was so little awareness left that they did not feel the small jarring of
their boots against
rock and snow. It was very
quiet.
Hall Davenant wondered dimly if he had not
always been walking from nothing to nowhere, across the snows of Ganymede, with
Jupiter enormous on the horizon and the stars cold overhead. He wondered if he
had not dreamed all his past, if Earth and Luna and mankind were not the
fleeting vision of the only life in the world as it stumbled mad through
desolation.
Yamagata
spoke. After so long a silence, it was a shock to hear his remote, toneless
voice. "We're not going to make it."
There was another stillness
while Kruse found words. Then: "Doesn't look like it. But there's no point
in sitting and waiting."
Pick-up-your-right-foot—glide—downl Pick-up-your-left-foot —glide—down!
"Not the way we're going, we
won't,"
said Yamagata. One gauntleted hand jerked toward the gauges on his shoulder.
"Look. Oxygen for barely two hours more. Juice
for maybe three, but it's no use staying warm if you can't breathe."
"Oh,
well," said Kruse. 'We weren't going anywhere anyway."
Pick-up-your-right-foot—glide—downl
There
was a time, several thousand years ago it seemed, when Davenant could not have
listened to them talking thus without a shiver in his guts. But cold and hunger
and weariness had dragged at him so long that it didn't make any difference
now.
His
companions looked blocky and inhuman in their helmeted suits. It was as if they
were demons leading him into darkness. But it didn't matter now.
Dreamily,
Davenant considered all the hope and strength which had once laid
within him. He had meant to be a soldier in man's finest war, the fight of all
men against a blind and indifferent nature which had brought their kind forth
without caring. But she was too strong, he thought vaguely; one casual giant
shrug of a planet's shoulders, and her parricide children were tumbled into
ruin.
No,
this wasn't the way an Engineer ought to be thinking, he told himself. Even at
the gates of death, there should still be pride. Ganymede had stripped it from
him, until he was nothing but a lurching blindness.
Yamagata
continued, almost absent-mindedly: "We might be headed in more-or-less the
correct direction. We might get a decent reception, if and when we
arrive."
"Or we might get shot down," said
Kruse. "Forget it."
"They
may be just beyond the next hill," said Yamagata. "Or they may
be—shall we say—three hours off. And we have oxygen for two hours."
Pick-up-your-left-foot—glide—down!
"Now,
our information is a good deal more important than any one of us," went on
Yamagata. "The Abbey has got to know. All right, I have an idea."
Kruse
slipped on a sheet of ice. He caught himself wearily, his fall was slow, and he
got up without bothering to curse.
"Torvald, you have people at home, don't
you?" asked Yamagata.
"Yeh,"
said Kruse. "Parents, a couple of sisters. And
there was a girl who—never mind." "How about you, Hall?"
"Not to speak
of," said Davenant mechanically.
"Nor I. And you're younger. Wait a minute." Yamagata stopped. The others
went on for several long low-gravity paces before their slowed brains brought
them around again.
Yamagata's face was like wrinkled yellow
cloth in the pouring Jupiter light. It had a little smile as he peered through
his face-plate. "They'll stick my name in Heros'
Hall or some such foolishness," he said. "What I wish you'd do, if
you live, is drink a beer for me at the Beacon in Luna City."
"Wait
a minute—" Kruse took a step toward him, but was too late. Yamagata had
already turned off his oxygen valves. Now, quite simply, he fumbled at some
screws and lifted his helmet.
Moist
air within rushed out in a freezing cloud. Blood bubbled on his hps, ran
from his nose and ears as pressure dropped, and congealed. He swayed for a long
time before toppling.
The
face, under its sudden mask of ice, was puffed and distorted beyond humanness.
Kruse stooped over. Even through the bulky suit, he could be seen to shake.
"He shouldn't have done that," he
mumbled. "He shouldn't have done it." The wind slipped under his
voice, a ghostly whistle.
Davenant felt ill. But his training rose
within him. This was part of what it meant to be an Engineer. At the very
least, Yamagata had returned that knowledge to him.
"He gave us each an hour's oxygen," he said.
"Yes. I wish he
hadn't."
"Somebody
has to make it, if that's
possible at all." Davenant felt tears on his cheeks. 'We're wasting time
standing here."
"I—suppose so, ldd."
Kruse
turned the body around and unclipped the bottles and accumulators. Then he laid
Yamagata out—the arms were not yet too rigid for him to fold the hands across
the breast, but he couldn't close the bulged-out eyes. There was nothing else
to do. Rising, he helped Davenant fasten on the new equipment.
"Let's go," he
said.
They went around a high dark bluff, and the
body was lost to sight.
After a while, Davenant said: "I wonder
if we shouldn't do the same. One survivor is better than none. We could match
for it."
"No," said Kruse. "That's
cutting our number too low. Come on."
Davenant
shook his head, as if he had been struck. But the shock had given him back his
manhood. As he walked, he could even remember, and he tried to sort out how it
had begun. Take it from the beginning, back at the Abbey—
Pick-up-your-right-foot—glide—
down! Pick-up-your-left-foot —glide—down!
CHAPTER
2
Seen
from outside, in the
harsh bright flare of sunlight or the deep soft blue which poured from Earth,
the Abbey was a fantastic witches' castle, perched on the cruel heights of
Archimedes Crater like the nest of some inhuman robber baron. It was built of
native stone, great rough-hewn blocks forming towers and walls of immense
thickness. All of it had a purpose, aimed at the future—spires for observation
and testing, walls and roofs to shut out raw vacuum. But in appearance it was
still archaic. It looked as if it had always been on the Moon.
There
was a road winding up to it, and a landing field for local rockets; further
back was a spaceport, where the shining ships were like spears poised at
heaven. There were also guns and arsenals and launching racks for guided missiles,
but they were hidden, and nothing was said about them. They had been stocked
against a day of trouble which might or might not come.
Inside, there was an endlessness of rooms and
passages, burrowing deep into the ground or climbing to the highest towers.
Some of these were for maintenance—food, water, air, power. In case of need,
the place could be made self-sufficient. Others were storerooms; still others
were laboratories where testing and research never ended; the rest were
sleeping chambers, refectories, assembly and
recreation centers.
There was always sound here—the whisper of
ventilators and engines, footfalls, talk, and music.
This
was Archimedes Academy, headquarters and training school of the Order of
Planetary Engineers. Few called it anything but the Abbey.
Hall Davenant walked down a corridor. It was
of dressed stone, high and vaulted, the tapestries and murals and fluorotubes never quite lifting its cool gloom. He walked
fast and crisply, his boots slamming in pride on the flagging, his gray tunic
and trousers forced into a painful neatness. That was the dress uniform of
Field Service.
His
shoulders bore the silver comets of Tech-Two rank, and on his breast was the
helium-atom insignia which said his speciality was nucleonics. He was a young man, with a young man's openness
in his rather long face, blue eyes, yellow hair, close cropped in the approved
Engineer style.
He
passed a couple of cadets, teen-aged boys who saluted him with bone-cracking
smartness. He responded, thinking that cadets were a nuisance, always going
through the rituals. For of course seniors had to conform
before them. That was part of the training. It did not occur to him that
he had graduated only three years previously.
Further
on, he met an elderly lab-man in the loose robe and short beard affected by
that service. This one had the gaunt, deep-burned features of a man who had
been in Field in his younger days and retired to the Abbey—for teaching, research,
and administration—when his body could no longer take deep space. He stopped
Davenant, who knew him slightly. "Hear you're going to Jupiter," he
said.
"Well—yes. Survey only
this trip."
"I know. Just wanted
to ask you to pick me up some samples of green callistite.
I've used up all we had, and want to run some more tests on it. Damnedest stuff
I ever saw."
"Different geology, different minerals,
within limits," Davenant said tritely.
"I know. And you tell me how we're going
to sink shafts fifty kilometers deep without knowing the properties of the
strata. I lost two months' work on Mars once, because we didn't know just how
friable the sandstone around Thor was. For God's sake, spend a
httle time with a sonic probe before drawing up your
specs!" "Certainly."
Davenant
got away as fast as he decendy could. After seven
years of training, he thought, and three of Field Service —Venus and the
Belt—he ought to know the elements of his trade!
Still
space was big, and other planets could be unearthly in startling and deadly
ways. You were never sure. An Engineer always walked with his life in his
hands. The labs were there to give him as firm a grip as possible, but even so
the tablets in Heros' Hall were getting overly
numerous.
He
came to the office he wanted and pushed the scanner button. The man inside,
Lyell, saw his face and punched to open the door for him. He entered, came to
attention, and saluted. Lyell was his new captain, and
some of them stood on ceremony even among seniors.
The
lean gray man waved him negligently to a chair. The office was furnished as
austerely as most of the Academy. That had a definite purpose, like everything
else; it kept the men used to discomfort, of which deep space had plenty. Field
men did not marry if they wanted to stay in that branch. They lived at the
Abbey, and their sprees when on leave were carried out incog. Eventually, of course, most who survived would acquire
wives. Then they got apartments in the underground village at the foot of the casde, became lab-men or technies,
perhaps at last made the Council.
Lyell was old to be a
spacer.
Few Engineers ever left the Order. Their
seven years as cadets included mind training under some of the most skilled psychotechnicians in the Solar System, and when they were
through, the Order and its esprit de corps were
part of them.
Davenant looked around.
Everybody else seemed to be there. AHhito Yamagata,
small and quiet: geologist. Torvald Kruse, big and
red-haired and cheerful, the son of a rancher on Venus: heavy construction. René Falkenhorst from Mars, tall and slender and dark:
mechanical engineer. Yuan Li, a trifle on the portly side, always smiling just
a bit: biological engineer. Davenant himself, was
atomics expert. And Arthur Lyell, stiff and gray, with enough
all-around experience to qualify him for chief.
The
men sat before the captain's desk, not speaking. Spacers learned to conserve
talk, lest they exhaust the supply on a long tour of duty. There was a haze of
smoke in the air from cigarettes and pipes.
"I
wanted to have a short conference with you," said Lyell. His eyes went
around their circle. "You'll be in centrifuge and so forth from now on
until we leave, and once in space well be busy enough studying up technical
details. As you know, we're off to the Jovian System on preliminary survey.
The Jovians want us to terraform
Ganymede and Callisto—a big job since the survey
alone may well take a year. Not many comforts of home out there. I suppose
you're all willing to go?"
"Of course," said Davenant, and
felt rather juvenile for having spoken.
"Not much is known about the Jovian
System or its settlers," Lyell went on. "I'm having the library stat
copies of what books and articles we have. The moons seem to be poor in natural
resources, so one thing well have to keep an eye out for is means of
payment."
He must have noticed Davenant's faint shock,
for he smiled and explained, "Yes, I know that sounds contrary to the
spirit of the Charter. The Planetary Engineers exist to make space available
for all men, regardless of race, creed, or political affiliations.
Nevertheless, ever since the Order broke away from being a branch of the Union
government and became an independent organization, it's had to pay its own way.
"So far, it's done well. We're by far
the wealthiest and most influential private organization in the System. But a
whole job of planetary transformation is so costly that we can't go into the
red. The Jovians are poor in fissionables,
and will probably be unwilling to part with any, so we'll look for other
resources. In fact, we may have to set up some industries for them to make
things we can use to pay the Order. Bear that in mind."
"We
always need small spaceships and machinery replacements," said Falkenhorst. "They should be able to make those."
"It's a thought," said Lyell.
"But what I most wanted to emphasize was this: you know the Order is stricdy non-political. Events have justified us. During the
late Humanist Revolution, for instance, we were the only major group left
undisturbed. We cut loose from the government because we foresaw trouble
coming. Well, it came, and it is still going on, and things are going to get
worse before they get better. If the Order is to survive the antiscientific
reaction building
up on Earth, it will have
to stick by its policy.
"That
isn't going to be easy. Jupiter, as the only state outside the Union, is
distrusted on the inner planets, and people won't thank us for building up
their potentials. The Jovians won't like us either,
since we are inner planetarians. And from what little
is known, Jovian society is such a turbulent mess that well doubtless be
pulled twenty ways at once by as many conflicting power groups.
"But
no matter what the provocation, remember your training and the rules, even if I
should die and leave you on your own. The Planetary Engineers exist to serve all mankind. Sometimes that sounds vapidly idealistic, but it's the only
way we can preserve our identity and privileges, the only way we can weather
the storm that is coming. The medieval Church was another supranational
organization. Its attempts to interfere with separate states led only to
trouble and ultimate failure, but in its character as the friend of all mankind
it was honored and powerful. When that power began to be used for personal and
local ends, the Church broke up. It's an example we might all bear in
mind."
He
grinned and turned to a thick sheaf of papers on bis desk.
"All
right, gentlemen. Lecture's over. Now let's get down
to particulars."
CHAPTER
3
"During
the lunatic years of the
latter twentieth century the White American Church arose and became popular in
the southern states of the old U.S.A. Like the contemporaneous Pilgrims, it
represented reaction—partly against the troubles which preceded, accompanied,
and followed World War III, partly against the spreading of scientific method
in human relations which those same troubles forced as the only solution.
Unlike the Pilgrim Church, the White Church method was not an attempt to return
to a fancied norm, but an eccentric leap toward an imaginary millennium. It was
not elaborately rationalized, but violently anti-intellectual; it was not
austere, but given to curious orgiastic rites.
"Some local politicians encouraged it so
as to gain an organized, reliable voting body, and eventually it dominated
many communities. Its intellectual isolationism caused it to go to still
further exeremes, especially against the concept of
equal rights for all races and the widening public appreciation of rational,
scientific thought. However, as it grew in wealth, to become of some
importance, it necessarily acquired an intelligentsia and a systematized
philosophy.
"The increasingly effective program of
undermining anti-rational organizations and beliefs, which was an important
feature of the so-called New Enlightenment, eventually began to shrink its
membership. The Second Conference of Rio had also made it obvious that before
long the limited world government of the U.N. would be superseded by the
complete federalism of the Solar Union which the White American doctrine
considered intolerable.
"Imitating
the earlier Pilgrim exodus to Mars, the Church decided to found a colony on
Ganymede, the Jovian System being chosen for its remoteness and the general
lack of competitive interest in settling it. A large ecological-unit spaceship,
the American, was built, and a number of smaller ones
obtained. The scheme was that some thousands of members would go out to start
the colony while the rest stayed at home and worked to finance the project.
"In
a decade or so of heroic effort, the city of X was firmly established—thus
named to suggest the mysterious character of divinity and its dwelling. But
meanwhile the financial drain had proved too great for the Mother Church. A membership
which had hitherto been loyal broke away in large part because it was being
impoverished by demands for money. Psychodynamic technicians of the government
were adroit in using the discontent as a wedge for propaganda. By Twenty-one
hundred A.D., the Jovial colonists found themselves
without a sponsor, no ties to Earth, almost completely cut off by the expense
of travel to their system.
"They
sent occasional observers and representatives to Earth, but there was no Union
governor over them since they seemed neither to need nor want one. Occasional
reports about them still come in, rumoring the evolution of a strange and
ruthless culture which through a series of 'revelations' has been changed far
from the original concept.
"But on the whole the Jovians have remained an isolated and unknown tribe. Their
declaration of independence while the Union was confused by the Humanist Revolt
on Earth, and their persistent refusal to rejoin, merely emphasizes their
already accomplished secession from the rest of the human race."
Davenant
switched off the microprojector that had been
screening de la Garde's Short History of Interplanetary Colonization.
He sighed. "He could
have gone into more detail."
"He wasn't interested," said Falkenhorst. "He deals with what he considers the main
line of history, the inner planets. Elsewhere he gives an economic analysis to
show that nothing beyond the Belt will ever be important—not enough resources,
too hard to colonize, the problem of survival won't leave any surplus
energy."
"As
a matter of fact," said Lyell, "the colony wouldn't have been
possible at all if the American government hadn't quietly subsidized it—by such
indirect means that the Church itself never knew about it. The Psychotechs foresaw that the attempt would exhaust and
break up the organization on Earth. I've seen secret records that the Humanists
made public."
"They
really did get Machiavellian back in those days, didn't they?" murmured
Yuan. "But seriously, there must be more information on Jupiter than
this."
"Of
course," said Lyell. "Plenty of it. But nothing coherent. Part of our task will be to get the
whole picture as it is today, so you boys, at least, may as well start without
preconceptions."
He
took out a curved pipe and began loading it. "Yes, there's scattered
information, but what nobody knows yet is the total cultural pattern. Just
remember that man necessarily develops a different civilization in every
environment if he stays long enough, and that what may shock you is normal,
perhaps necessary, on Ganymede. Also—the Order stays out of politics]"
Davenant
reflected on what he had seen and heard. He had been on Earth but little, even
though the Engineers did some work there. Their main interest was space. The
planet of his birth had become a stranger to him.
But
he knew the hectic commerce and gaiety which was Luna City; knew the stiff
dignity, the high sense of order and discipline, and the respect for
intellectual achievement that characterized Mars; was familiar with the patriarchal, somewhat violent clan
life which was developing on Venus since the invention of the cheap mobile
reclamation unit. But Ganymede would not be like anything he knew.
The
ship, Let There Be Light, hummed and murmured. Stars blazed against blackness.in the vision ports. She was a cruiser, one of
the new models which could accelerate most of the way and reach even Jupiter in
a couple of weeks.
There were only the 'six of them aboard, with
a full cargo of equipment and supplies. That was not cutting it as fine as an
ordinary spaceman would think. Even though only Lyell and Davenant had the full
specialized knowledge required for a certificate, any Engineer could operate a
spaceship alone if it had not been too drastically damaged.
Lyell
puffed smoke and squinted through a mesh of crow-feet.
"One more thing might need
emphasizing," he said. 'Well be there for a year, I imagine, and you'll
want recreation from time to time. I'm afraid you'll have to do without it.
One of the psychological mainstays of the Order's power is the impression of
lawfulness and restraint its men give."
"We know that, Boss," said Kruse,
looking hurt. "Yes, of course. Still, on an inner planet job a man does
get leaves, he knows what amusements accord with local customs, and he goes incog anyway. None of that will be true on Ganymede. I
doubt if they have red lights of any sort, for instance, and no disguise will
be good enough in so small a commune. On a planet where hedonism was considered
normal, where everyone was expected as a matter of morals to indulge himself,
we would. But if, as I suspect, the Jovians have a
Puritan code, well have to go them one better."
"Oh,
well." Kruse grinned. "I figured as much, and built up a reserve the
last time I was in Luna City."
Davenant
felt a certain wistful envy of the man. He himself was too shy and
introverted, he knew, to make a decent roisterer. An occasional fling in a
licensed rec house, beer and gambling and whatnot was
about his speed. If he were rich—but Engineers didn't get
rich. All the profits of the Order went back into the Order and its
development. Personnel from cadet to coordinator drew small salaries and no
bonuses. The rewards were intangible—prestige, comradeship, a sense of being
important to man's highest and finest adventure.
A watch-change bell broke up the discussion.
Some went to sleep, some to their posts. Only Kruse and Davenant remained in
the little saloon. The Venusian drifted across to a
locker—they were currendy in free-fall orbit—and got
two bulbs of beer.
"This ends my ration for today," he
said. "Care to join me, Hall?"
"Sure." Davenant took one, put the
tube in his mouth, and squeezed. The cool tingle of it was refreshing.
Kruse
hooked a leg around a stanchion and hung across the table from him. "If
I'm not getting too personal," he asked, "why did you join?"
"Eh?
Oh!" Davenant felt himself reddening, for no good reason. That irritated
him, but he liked the big Venusian. "The usual. They saw my school and psych records,
offered me an appointment, I took it. Isn't that what happens to
everybody?"
"Yeah, sure. But you were only fourteen or fifteen then, not really capable of
deciding such a thing. A lot of kids sign up because they think it's glamorous,
and drop out after a couple of years. What made you stick?"
"What
makes anybody stick? I was a poor boy. My father was one of the intellectual routineer class which was
displaced by the Second Industrial Revolution, though he never joined the
Humanists. He didn't like living off citizen's allowance and odd jobs—called
it a handout. My people were Alaskans, with some of the pioneer tradition left
in them. But his health was too frail for him to emigrate to Mars or Venus. I
didn't want to go through that myself."
Davenant
shrugged, not meeting Kruse's blue eyes. There had been other reasons—a girl,
other women since then, even if he wasn't a successful chaser. Sometimes he
wondered if a man ever really falls out of love. The pain stops, most of it,
and presently a new love comes along. But isn't she
merely added to the pantheon?
"Why do you ask?"
he said.
"Oh, just getting acquainted."
Erase shrugged. "Me, I was offered the same, and my folks urged me to accept.
Parents' consent is needed on Venus. The family is more important there than
it's become in Western Earth. It'd be something for the clan to brag about, a
member in the Engineers. So I did join and I'm not sorry, but I think I'll
resign after this job is over."
Davenant felt shocked. "How come? Don't you like it?"
"Sure.
But I'm pushing forty, and it's time I raised a family. The lucky girl can't
see living on Luna, so I've got my eye on a valley in the Hellfires.
Under the Development Act, I can homestead the whole place. It's just rock and
sand now, but give me a few years and it'll be the
sweetest little oasis you ever saw."
"There's
a breakdown
coming," said Davenant. "The Humanists didn't stay in power long, no,
but they were only one symptom. You can see corruption and personal government
are growing. You're better off belonging to an organization which is above
such matters."
"Now
you're just parroting what your trainers taught you," said Kruse.
"It's probably true enough as far as Earth is concerned, but Venus is a
big place. Have you ever thought that maybe the Order is wrong? That maybe by
setting itself above the realities of politics it's cutting itself off from its
own roots?"
Davenant
gulped beer and tried to settle a suddenly chaotic mind. It was not merely that
Kruse spoke heresy. The Order permitted, even encouraged independent thinking
for the simple reason that a rigid brain was no good for its purposes. But the
Venusian, what he had seen of him, had never given
the impression of being an intellectual beyond the requirements of his work. A
skilled technician, yes, a big,
laughing, hard-fisted tosspot, a collector of improper limericks, but he had
no business dealing in disquieting philosophies.
Davenant
was not especially narrow. He read widely, enjoyed music and chess, liked to
think of himself as a bit of a
universalist. But he realized now with some dismay
that his intellectually formative years might have been too bookish, too
concentrated on one ideal and in one way of life. He had crossed millions of
kilometers and seen strange landscapes, but had he ever looked into the soul of
a man —even his own?
"Let's
have another beer," he said hastily. "We can borrow from tomorrow's
ration. How about some chess?"
CHAPTER
4
Seen
from space,
Ganymede was bleaker than Luna herself—seamed with mountains, pocked with
craters, mottled dark and light over her sterile face. This far from the sun,
her dayside was wrapped in dusk. Since she always faced Jupiter, the primary
was gibbous or only a great scimitar while the sun was
up, and at high noon a total eclipse threw blackness across the land.
As the cruiser approached, her radar picked
up an object in orbit not far above the surface: metallic, to judge from the
intensity of the returning signal.
"Odd," muttered Lyell. "I know
the colonists broke up the old American and
most of their other spaceships for the parts. I didn't know they'd established
a satellite station."
He beamed a call, but there was no answer. Only the dry whisper of cosmic interference.
"Maybe a ship parked
there?" suggested Yuan.
"Too big to be an ordinary ship. Well—let's come down the hard way,
then."
It
was a tricky job to ride a vessel as massive as the Light down a GCA beam, but Lyell managed it with hardly a bump.
When
they were in their cradle, Davenant looked out and could not see much of X—just
the spacefield, a radio mast, several buildings, and
a cluster of other structures which were well distant. Most of it must be
underground.
The sun was a tiny, blinding flame in a sky
nearly black. The tremendous edge of Jupiter dominated heaven—amber, streaked
with dull reds and blues and greens and browns, splotches which were storms
that could have swallowed Earth whole. The planet was so big that it seemed to
be endlessly falling, about to crash ruinously on the broken face of its moon.
Io was visible as a giant sliver to one side of the primary. The whole sky
looked unnatural, like something seen in a dream.
A
ring of hills shouldered starkly above the horizon, barely visible in the
vague, cold, misty twilight under which the world seemed to he.
Davenant saw fields of snow that must be frozen ammonia,
and part of the range looked as if it might be one enormous chunk of ice. The
air was thin —nitrogen and argon, a wisp of methane and other gases.
Luna
had been near home when the first men reached it; Mars had had some life, at
least; Venus had been a wind-howling hell, but rich with promise. This place
seemed to hold a perpetual despair. It was, somehow, the grimmest scene
Davenant had ever experienced.
Trying
to shake off his depression, he pointed to the nearer buildings—long, low,
featureless boxes with an odd bluish shimmer.
"I wonder what those
are made of?" he asked.
"Ice, I imagine,"
said Falkenhorst. ,
Davenant blinked. "You
mean solid water?"
"Surely,"
said the Martian. "There's a lot of it on the Galilean moons. It's a
pretty good insulator, can be worked with a blow-torch or cast into molds, and
if you make your walls thick enough and insulate them on the inside, they'll do
fine at these temperatures."
Davenant nodded. He should have realized
that. His training, the whole history of space colonization emphasized that
other worlds were not Earth, and that a whole new approach was needed for each
one.
"Ill bet they use the Absolute scale habitually here,"
he said. "It'd be too much trouble always to speak of minus a hundred and
some degrees Centigrade."
"You're getting the
idea," said Falkenhorst.
There was no provision for taking a spaceship
cradle underground, but a small trac appeared,
drawing a long plastitube two meters in diameter out
of a valve in one building. It gripped around the airlock, and Lyell led his
crew through it. They were all in dress uniform and wore their carefully
schooled dignity on their features.
Emerging
at the farther end of the tube, they stepped into a room which struck them with
chill. The Jovians must have habituated themselves to
such temperatures, to conserve power. Davenant, for one, had to take conscious
control of somatic reactions, and force his body to accept the conditions.
Ten
guards were drawn up on either side of the entrance, an immobile line. They had
the gangling, bulge-chested slendemess
which was also characteristic of Martians—low gravity, low air pressure even
inside the settlements—but this was exaggerated, for they were easily two
meters tall. Under steel helmets, their faces were white rather than
sun-darkened. Their uniform was a one-piece black coverall fitting the
muscular bodies closely, boots, a belt supporting pistol and pouch; their
heads were shaven, and they stood like robots.
It took a second glance for Davenant to
realize that they were identical.
He
jammed the sudden cold in his mind back out of consciousness. Keep up the act,
keep up the act. An Engineer is never surprised.
Two
other men, were waiting beyond the guards. One wore
the same black one-piece uniform, with a glittering silver star on the belt.
But he had his hair. He was rather short and stocky, eyes gray and utterly
cold, face harsh-scarred. The other man, long and thin and comparatively serene
looking, wore a blond beard, though his skull was bare, and a black robe with a
white cross on the breast. He held back, bowing silently, as the smaller man
stepped forward and spoke.
"God with us I
Welcome, gemmen. Had good trip?"
"Thank you, yes." Lyell inclined
his gaunt gray head. "I am Captain Lyell of Archimedes Academy, in charge
of this group."
"Cine-Four Halleck." The dialect seemed to be a variant of rather
archaic English, a curious blend of soft slurring and crisp, rapid delivery.
The man gestured to his robed companion. "Angel-three
Garson." Another bow from that one.
"Can we do y'all a service?"
"You might show us to
our quarters," Lyell said coolly.
"Baggage? UnloadinT'
"The
ship is not to be touched," said Lyell. "There are things in her
which could be dangerous to one not familiar with details. If you will lend us
a porter, one of us will show him our personal effects."
Halleck
nodded and spoke briefly into a wrist-phone. As he stood looking over the
visitors, he could almost be seen to freeze. His eyes strayed uncontrollably to
Yuan and Yamagata. He jerked them away only to have them return. Davenant
wondered why.
A gray-clad, hairless man entered from a side
door. The first thing noticeable about him was his gigantic size and his four
arms. The next, and somehow most lasting impression, was of the inhuman
vacancy of his face.
"Porter, gemmen," said Halleck.
At
a signal from LyelL Davenant led the way back through
the tube. The giant followed wordlessly, and said nothing when the small heap
of handbags was pointed out to him—merely picked them up and trudged back.
There was no reason why the Engineers should not have carried their own things,
except the matter of dignity.
When Davenant returned, he found Lyell
talking with Halleck and Falkenhorst with the angel,
Garson, who was asking some shrewd questions about the propulsion of the
Light. Davenant recalled that the ion drive had still been experimental when
Ganymede had been colonized. "This way, please."
Halleck
turned and led them out. A descending ramp wound into the body of the world.
Davenant noticed that the identical guards were going before and after the
group, and that their eyes were never still.
"We've assigned y'a
suite in Sector Eight, border between Cine an' Angel territory," Halleck
said. "Y' can easily communicate with one service or t'other.
Meals 11 be brought there. If y'allll
gimme your prefrences, 111 try to have 'em met, though we're not a rich
colony."
"We
don't ask for luxury," said Lyell. "Just remember that your dietary
requirements may have changed slightiy from
ours."
The suite turned out to consist of six small
bedrooms and a bath surrounding a larger common chamber. The furniture was
simple, comfortable enough under low-gee conditions, but the whole place had a
barren and empty look. After a moment's thought, Davenant traced that impression
down to the completely unimaginative, inartistic appearance. Everything seemed
to have been laid out with a ruler, and the lining plastic was drab gray. Oh,
well.
Garson
showed them the corn-unit with which they could call up various offices when
they wanted something, and gave them a collection of large-scale maps of city
and satellite.
"Further reference works whenever y'all
wish," he said. He had a meek way of speaking. "Imagine y'all want to
get unpacked and rested. Call me when you wish a first conference."
"Cinc-one should'a met y'all
himself, I know," added Halleck, though without any air of apology,
"but you'll see him soon enough. We've litde
ceremony here. God with you, gemmen."
He saluted crisply and backed out the door.
His guards followed him. The angel bowed and went out last.
"Weill" Kruse threw his bulk onto a
low couch. "Charming hospitality!"
"Different
mores," Lyell said absently. "That may have been their equivalent of a
brass band and parade, for all I know. Don't go insisting on any special
favors, boys. Pass all that through me." He frowned. "I'm afraid
we've made a mistake right at the beginning."
"How so?" asked Falkenhorst.
"Bringing
Yuan and Yamagata."
"What
in space—" demanded Kruse. "What's wrong
with 'em?" The two men spoken of retreated into
expressionless-ness.
"Nothing, of course," snapped
Lyell. "But we should have remembered the idiotic race prejudice which was
so important to the colony's founders. Apparentiy
it's still present. Didn't you see how Halleck was reacting?"
"Race?" Kruse broke into a guffaw. "After some of the types they seem to've been breeding here?"
"Prejudices don't have to be logical or
consistent," Lyell told him. "In fact, they usually aren't. It's
sheer lucky chance that we didn't happen to bring a Negro Engineer." He
glanced at Yuan and Yamagata. "I think you two boys could get by if we're
discreet. A Mongoloid doesn't look that much different from a white man."
"A pink man, you
mean." Yamagata grinned.
"It
just points out how much we have to watch ourselves," said Lyell.
"Oh, well, if they get too offended
they'll merely send us home," said Falkenhorst.
"Let them freeze forever, then."
Lyell
demurred. "This job is more important to the Order than you seem to
realize. Not only the profit we stand to make, but this will be the first
large-scale terraforming job we've had. The Mars and
Venus projects were already well under way when the old corps was founded.
We've handled big jobs, yes, but nothing of comparable magnitude. The value of
this task in experience and prestige is inestimable. It'll go a long. way toward getting us that
monopoly of our kind of work which we need for power and safety."
Davenant,
who had been doing some heavy thinking since his talk with Kruse, didn't quite
like the tone of that. Was it so certain that the Order had a right to such
power? He brooded over it while he unpacked.
Lyell
called up the commissariat office and asked for dinner. It was brought by
four-armed men, the same type as the porter, though not identical with him. The
silence with which they served the meal was eerie. When Lyell asked one of them
a question, he shook his head in an animal way and pointed to his throat.
"Either
mute, or under orders not to speak," said Davenant. "I wonder
why?" There was a coldness along his spine.
The
food was mostly synthetic, not especially good, though some effort had been
made to spice it. Kruse grimaced and reached for the decanter which experiment
had shown to hold some alcoholic liquid.
"Go
easy on that rotgut," warned Lyell. "Remember, our official doctrine
is austerity."
Kruse
shrugged. "It's awful, anyway. Lucky I stuck a few bottles of Scotch in my
bag."
When
a service bell brought the waiters back to clear off the dishes, Davenant
wondered if X lacked machinery for such work, or if live service had the same
ostentation value it had on Earth. He consulted the city maps and decided it
was no machinery. Logical enough. A precarious colony
on an inhuman world didn't have materials or labor to spare for making luxury
robots.
The
maps were highly detailed, and it took a good many of them to cover the whole
three-dimensional warren. Davenant gathered that this was the official level, where
Cincs and Angels had their offices, and the upper
echelons lived. Further down were the cells given to Sergeants, apparently the
commoners who surely didn't have much sleeping space. Elsewhere were factories,
laboratories, creches, assembly halls, and
storerooms.
One
sector of X was marked, Cinc-one-four, but otherwise left blank. The rulers didn't
seem to publicize the layout of their quarters, perhaps for fear of envious
comparisons.
'T
get a general picture of an oligarchy as hard-boiled as any in history,"
remarked Lyell, after considering the maps. "Those guards, for
instance—obviously they're exogenes from one
cell."
"Would the Jovians
know that technique?" wondered Falkenhorst.
"Oh yes," said Yuan. "It was
used a good two hundred years ago by the old U.N. Inspectorate to create a
corps of gifted secret service men. It's been public for more than half that
time, though little applied. Identical heredity, identical
training—the psychological effects are curious, for you get a completely
devoted band of brothers. Then the four arms—that indicates
the Jovians are well up on the newer methods of gene
and chromosome manipulation. Either they got data from Earth or they developed
the system independently, most likely the first since they have had some contact.
I dare say the commoners, Sergeants, whatever you call them, are bred and
trained and regarded as animals—specialized types. No, I can't say I like
Jovian societyl"
"That Angel—odd name! Garson seems a
pretty decent sort," said Yamagata. "How about calling him and
pumping him now?"
"I don't know what his sleeping hours
are," said Lyell. "But we can, I suppose." He went over to the
com. A ringing doorbell some minutes later announced their visitor. As Davenant
opened the door, he heard a loudspeaker system filling the corridor with:
"—yes,
the Lord is mighty, brethren, an' His hand lies heavy. Rouse not the anger o'
the Lord, for he who's cursed by Him is cursed indeed. Rather show that
meekness and obedience which're pleasin'
unto Him—"
Sermons, yetl As
Davenant closed the door he was glad it was soundproof.
Garson's
expression was a peculiar mixture of timidity and eagerness. When he was
offered a chair, he sat on the very edge, and he was given to starting at any
sudden movement.
"How official are you?" asked
Lyell. "If you can speak for the government, I'd like to get some
questions straightened out at once."
"We—" Garson fumbled for words.
"My class is religious, y* understand. Mercy—" He hesitated, seeming
unsure how to address the guest. "Sir," he finished. 'We conduc' services an'—intellectual
activities, too. Engineering procedure is our province as far as y'aU're concerned, though we don't
make policy."
"Good
enough. You understand we are here only as a survey group, to find out if it
will be possible at all to transform Ganymede and Callisto.
It will take a good deal of work, a long time, to learn even that much, and we shall have to ask for help from your
people."
"Crews will—be assigned, sir,"
replied Garson. "Equipment an'—" His voice trailed off and he combed
his thin beard with nervous fingers.
"They will be under our direction,
exclusively."
"If
y wish, sir. But—" The Angel paused again.
"From what y already know o' conditions here, sir,
what—what hopes d'you have o' success?"
"I
would rather not say," answered Lyell. "Not yet. Every world presents
its own problem. How much do you know about earlier projects of this
nature?"
"Very little, sir. I'd be, uh, grateful for what y' can tell
me."
Lyell settled back for a lecture. "Well,
then," he said. "Venus was made habitable by chemical treatment to
get the poisons out of the atmosphere, by special bacteria strains which
released oxygen from its compounds, and by hydrogen explosions to bring water
to the surface. To mention only the most superficial aspects of a task which took more than a century. It is still going on as far
as desert reclamation is concerned. Plant types were developed to fit the new
conditions, and as the environment changes with time still other forms will be
introduced. Animal life was brought from Earth; or rather, its reproductive
cells were, with exogenesis on Venus to start the first generation.
"On
Mars, now, the problem has been in many ways different. There were no poison
gases, and there was a little oxygen and surface water, although not nearly
enough for human life. Still it was a start. More oxygen was obtained by bacterial
process, more water by drilling, but it was still necessary to import a great
deal—"
"Where from, sir?" Garson asked eagerly. "The fuel requirements
must'a been fantastic if—uh—from Earth."
Lyell
smiled. "No. From Saturn. The rings are mostly ice, there are even enormous meteors, or small moons of ice.
It took several years' work, and was tricky to give a number of big chunks
enough of a push to fall sunward and make them hit Mars just where desired.
But—well, it was practicable. Large scale electrolysis and
other treatment for some of it.
"The whole task was costiy
and enormous, of course, but when millions of people with atomic energy and the
resources of a whole planet, even a small one, behind them, bend all their
efforts to a job, it gets done. Oh, yes, much carbon dioxide was also required,
to give sufficient greenhouse effect at that distance from the sun.
"In spite of all this, Mars will always
be a cold and arid world with a thin atmosphere. So the geneticists had to meet
conditions halfway, by creating not only plants and lower animals, but even slightiy modified human strains which can be comfortable in
such an environment. And there are other complications, such as making up the
gas which continually leaks into space. I tell you, Mars is a tough probleml
"It's
being solved. On the other hand, no one would even try to give an atmosphere to
Luna or Mercury. Our whole approach is different there, concentrating on things
like more efficient airlocks and larger underground installations.
"The available materials and energy
sources also determine a great deal. On Mercury or Luna, sun-power can be used direcdy or stored in capacitors. In the early days on
Venus, the Hilsch tube was important, and wind power
still is. On Mars, though, it was necessary to use atomic energy so extensively
that its reserves are depleted and we must concentrate on the physics of low
potential. We hope to help out when our solar-beam stations on Mercury are
finished.
"But I freely predict that no one will
ever found a real colony on, say, the moons of Uranus. There are no energy
sources to speak of, no useful minerals, they're too
far away for power beamed from Mercury. Not only is it not worthwhile, but it
isn't a practical possibility. So you see, Ganymede and Callisto
will have to be studied carefully before we can know what the chances are of
making them habitable—or, indeed, doing anything with them."
Davenant's
right shoulder itched. He longed to scratch it, but made himself sit
impassively. Lyell's lecture was for a definite purpose—to impress, to gain a
certain slight moral ascendancy. It wouldn't do to break up the act of mentor
just to scratch. Inwardly, he squirmed.
"We've—ah—we've
done well so far, sir," Garson said diffidently. "There're fifty
thousand people in X alone, besides smaller cities an' isolated outposts. I
think there's good hope."
"Possibly,"
said Lyell, with a note of calculated skepticism. "But do you have decent
ore deposits so we can get structural metals? How much water is there in all?
How much of every type of compound? How available is the oxygen? I don't think
biological techniques will get it out for you. I doubt if any bacterium can be
made which won't die or spore up at these temperatures."
Yuan
murmured, "There might be ways, even so. But I'd have to have some figures
before knowing if I have a practical idea."
"What energy sources do you have?"
Lyell persisted. "Can we tap internal heat, or isn't there enough? The sun
is too far away to help much, even with power beaming. Offhand, I think the
thing to do is sink shafts and start hydrogen-lithium fires down in them to
warm up the body of the moon. Some of that energy could be tapped to make an
outdoor lighting system. Then there is the problem of getting rid of the
methane and ammonia.
"The
surface area of Ganymede is something like eighty-five million square
kilometers. You can see what a gigantic task we have. Interplanetary freight
rates being what they are, it cannot be done at all unless most of the work and
resources come from this world itself. Even if we take the job, the Engineers
cannot supply the whole labor force. Most of it must be supplied from your own
people, and can you spare so many? That calls for socio-economic analysis.
"In short, we are here now to see if
you, yourselves, under our direction, can swing the job. Even the survey will
require cooperation. Even for it, we may have to call on you for a great deal
in the way of materials and manpower. We must have carte blanche to go anywhere and get any information. Are
you willing to set that much at stake against the mere possibility that we can
help you?"
"O' course," said Garson. "Y'd not 'a been asked ay'tall if we weren't. There are—uh—some facts which're—confidential, but the Engineers respect their
clients' secrets, don't they?"
Lyell
nodded. "If nothing else, we can show you some modern techniques," he
said. "For instance, molar potential barriers to eliminate airlocks and
all their clumsiness in fixed installations, more efficient food synthesis
reactions, and so on."
Garson
actually blushed. "Have you—uh—considered—the terms yet, sir?"
"The
Abbey has already agreed with your representative on the flat rate for a
survey. Payment for further work will depend on what we want and what you can
afford. That can be negotiated later."
There
was a little small talk then, but the Angel was clearly shy of strangers and
glad when he found an excuse to leave. He set an hour for the next meeting, at
which a formal commission would begin the real business, and made his good
nights.
Lyell
stared after him. "I wonder what he's afraid of," he muttered, eyes
narrowing.
"Us,
maybe," said Yamagata. "Strangers coming into a
pathologically xenophobic culture—hmmm." He stopped. "I just
had an idea. Think these people know Basic?"
"I doubt it,"
said Falkenhorst. "Why?"
"Hall"—Yamagata turned to Davenant,
an odd look on his face—"you have your general unit handy?" He was
speaking the new, semantically rigorous language now. -"Want to check the
wiring in this room?"
Magnetic tracing of circuits revealed what he
had suspected: microphones and recorders behind the plastic facing of the walls.
Lyell's mouth drew tight. "That's
a violation of—" "Different mores, Chief!" Falkenhorst's gibe held a note of strain.
"We can make an
official complaint," suggested Yuan.
"Set
up a resonator and burn the damn things out!" cried Davenant. "Or
keep a magnetic field to wipe the tapes, at least."
"Hell," grunted Kruse, 'leave 'em alone, but give 'em something
really interesting to record!"
"No—no!" Lyell shook his head. "None of that. Not yet, not rill we know more of the
situation. I'm afraid we've already given away much we can ill afford, but 111
have to think about it. Meanwhile, keep to English for ordinary purposes,
switch to Basic when necessary, but watch your tongues every minute."
Davenant looked around the room. He had known
the inanimate savagery of planets, but this was the first time he had ever
encountered hostility from men. The walls seemed to move together and close in
on him.
Ganymede spun twice around Jupiter, a period
of slighdy more than two weeks, while Lyell's men
were only starting their task, learning the bare elements of Jovian society.
Most of their work was with the Angels, studying maps and references in the
library, conferring and asking questions. But they could hardly help acquiring
unofficial information.
Garson,
who seemed to have taken a fancy to Davenant, conducted him through the city.
The factories and maintenance centers were fairly standard for a colony,
though archaic in design and using an undue amount of human labor. That was
performed by Sergeants under Angel supervisors. Watching a long assembly line
of gray-clad, un-speaking men, Davenant felt a coldness
in his stomach. He had never seen human beings so used.
"Why
haven't you installed robot machinery?'' he asked. "This
could all be fully automatic."
Garson shrugged. "Large investment o'
material an' labor in robots," he said, easier, t' use men trained from
birth."
Sol The commoners
were part of the machinery. They didn't count for more than the lathes and
furnaces they manned. Davenant had that fact driven home to him when he walked
through the human robots' part of town—endless, monotonous cells, almost devoid
of individuality, no privacy anywhere, always the conditioning by broadcast
sermons and minute regulations of conduct. The faces which looked at him meekly
were masks; humanness had been rubbed out.
Not many women were in sight, and those he
saw were muffled in shapeless gray gowns and veils. They had then-own
assignments in such lighter work as food-making and product inspection. And
they were breeders. Garson justified their status with Biblical quotations.
There was little family life. Children were
taken young to the creches for conditioning. On the
basis of psych tests, some were picked for Angel and some for Cine, to be
raised in those services and never told who their parents were.
The
Angels were the priesthood, and spent their lives under a monastic rule which
made the Abbey seem mild— though they were not celibate. They were also the
intellectual and artistic class, the engineers, poets, scientists, and
philosophers of sorts. They compiled the data Davenant was now studying, and
served as administrative advisors.
In
spite of the humility which was drilled into them, they seemed more human, more
individual, than any other class on Ganymede. Fat jolly Jackson, small sardonic
Hobart, earnest tongue-tied Garson—Davenant could get
along with them.
As
a group, the Angels were a power in the community, and had had their clashes
with the Cincs. The Cincs,
who were the rulers, had the upper hand, for Cincs of
first and second grade were ex officio Archangels.
But
sometimes the corps resisted them successfully. Garson told with relish the
story of a few years ago, when Cinc-one had tried to
seize property owned by the Angels.
They
had refused to obey him, and had held out until a junta of his own subordinates
had replaced him with a more reasonable man.
Davenant
met the chief Cine when the Engineers were invited to the Cine area. Halleck
conducted them, together with a troop of Hounds.
Lyell tried to draw Halleck out a little.
"I take it these guards of yours are for show?"
"No." Halleck
looked surprised. "Protection."
"From
whom? The Sergeants?"
"Haw!
The Sergeants know their place, I hope. A few publicly owned Hounds can keep
them in order. But y' see, every Cine above novice grade is entided
to his own corps o' guards, as many as he can support."
"I
don't quite understand," Lyell said smoothly. "If the commoners
aren't dangerous, why should a Cine need a personal
army?"
"The other Cincs'
o' coursel" clipped Halleck. "God gives
victory to the righteous, but we men can't know who that is. Many
re called but few're chosen. So all got to have their chance."
Lyell
did not press the matter, but he traded a glance with Falkenhorst.
Cine territory was a change from the poverty
elsewhere in X. The floors were carpeted, the walls and ceilings colorful with
murals, the individual apartments spacious and luxuriously furnished. Davenant
got the impression that each housed its own harem. Several other officers
passed by, exchanging salutes with Halleck, and there was a flicker of hatred
in their eyes. None had less than two bodyguards in tow, and each carried a
side-arm.
A
massive steel door was protected by machine-guns behind armor plating. Halleck
strode up to meet the tall Hound who stood in front of the barricade.
"God with us!" "Service to the
Lord!"
"I bring Cinc-one's
guests. Here's my pass."
The
Hound studied it carefully. "Yes, Mercy. If youll leave y'r men an' y'r pistol here—"
Halleck
smiled sarcastically and submitted. Davenant did not like the swift competent
hands which passed over him in search of weapons. But his resentment faded when
he was let through the door. The reception hall was a blaze of color and crude
magnificence.
A
servant bowed low. Female, young and comely, she was not dressed in any long
drab gown. Quite the opposite. Kruse opened his mouth
in an admiring grin, but snapped it shut as he remembered where he was.
"Ill announce you, Mercy," the girl said. "Service to the Lord!"
Cinc-one Weller was short and rather stout, but
the eyes in his broad red face were restless and cold. He greeted the Engineers
with an ambiguous salute and waved them to chairs. Davenant was uneasily aware
of the motionless guards standing against the wall.
"I
trust y'r accommodations 're
good?" Weller said. "Anything y need?"
"Not just yet, Mercy," answered
Lyell. "Before long, well be making our initial surveys and will want
workers and equipment. But that can doubtless be arranged through the Angel
corps."
"Course, course." Weller accepted a drink from a well-trained servant. "If y'all do
need somethin' please ask fr
it."
"Well,
Mercy"—Lyell rubbed his chin—"there is one thing we lack, and that is
information."
"Oh. Can't the Angels give y' all the
facts?"
"About
physical data, yes," said Lyell. "But we need a more detailed social
analysis than anything that's been given us. An important factor in deciding
how much can be done here is the capability of the people themselves. For
instance, it will be necessary to construct a great deal of automatic
machinery. Frankly, Mercy, I'm disappointed that there isn't more already. Now
the question is, can your particular culture stand the
introduction of so much new technology?"
Weller's
face darkened. For an instant, Davenant thought he was going to order his men
to shoot the Engineers down.
He returned to a hard surface calm and
replied judicially, "I don't see why not. S'pose y' mean assembly line
workers an' their like. What'll happen to 'em if their jobs 'er
automatized? That's really not your business. We can
build such machines, put 'em
at your disposal. What we do with 'em afterward
concerns us alone."
"Perhaps,"
said Lyell. "Though consider, Mercy, that human assembly lines simply
cannot produce what will be needed at the rate it will be needed. So there
will, at the very least, be an interim where your Sergeants have no place to
work—except out in the field with us. And there they will, frankly, be of
little use unless you recondition and educate them. At present, I have the
impression that most of them don't have the effective intelligence to use
complex machines." After a pause, he added maliciously, "Of course,
Angels and Cincs could be assigned to our crews but
that would also disrupt your social structure."
"Hm—yes^-problem
there," admitted Weller grudgingly. "It calls fr
study. I'm sure a solution can be found."
"Another question," drawled
Yamagata. "Is Callisto inhabited or is it
not?"
"Why, no," said Halleck, when
Weller failed to reply. "What made you think it was? We haven't expanded
that much yet."
"There were references in books and
conversation implying a small colony there," said Yamagata. "But
nobody I asked would give me a straight answer."
Weller spoke almost genially, as if glad to
leave an awkward subject. "Oh, I see. Small group o'
settlers there from Earth, some twenty-five years ago. Came out t' escape troubles durin' the
Humanist affair. They couldn't make a go of it alone, so they came here,
and joined with us. All but forgotten now."
He
thinks fast on his feet, observed Davenant. But he wouldn't be the chief in this nest of devils unless he did.
"If
I may say so, Mercy," put in Lyell, "your culture is an odd blend of
the communal and the highly individualistic. Sergeants are trained to absolute
obedience,' but most of your new works are carried out by individual Cincs, who patronize some gifted Angel or some new
construction project or the like."
Davenant
nodded to himself. He had noticed as much, and decided the motivation was a
compounded desire for power and prestige.
Lyell went on.' "So far that system has worked well
enough, because almost everything you could name had to
be done anyway—mines started, oudying settlements
founded,
machinery built. But it will take the coordinated effort of
all your people to transform these moons. Do you think
the members of the Cine class can be trusted to work co-
operatively?" Q
"111 see they do." Weller forced a laugh. "Y* go a long way to criticize
us."
"Only as far as I must, Mercy. It's not my business to judge the way you
have chosen to order your affairs to date. But insofar as that affects my job,
I have a duty to make suggestions."
"We
don't have t' employ the Order," Weller said coldly. "We can do the
job ourselves, y' know."
"As
you wish, Mercy."
Lyell
was poker faced, but it was clear enough that he had the whip hand. The Jovians were not capable of the enterprise. They lacked the
special skills and resources it called for. And as long as they were locked
underground, dependent on a complex of machines and chemicals for the most
elementary necessities of life, they could never amount to anything in Solar trade or politics.
The
conversation at supper turned to the inner planets. Davenant noticed that
Weller never lost a chance to needle Halleck—small personal remarks and slights
which brought the Cinc-four's rage close to boiling
over. It was not a comfortable party.
Back
in their own suite, the Engineers dropped into Basic for the benefit of the
recorders.
"I
can't say I'm overly fond of our hosts," declared Yuan. "Mechanized
common people, fear and hate and ambition the prime
motives of the rulers. I wonder if we ought to do their job for them."
"You know our rule
about local politics," said Lyell.
"Seems
you were doing your share of politicking tonight, Chief," Yamagata said
slyly.
"I've
the authority to make suggestions," answered Lyell. "If they go
unheeded, I can give a negative report which will make the Abbey drop the job.
But that's all."
"There's
something inhuman about the setup," declared Kruse. "People aren't
robots. The Sergeant class simply can't be treated that way indefinitely.
They'll either mutiny or degenerate to uselessness."
"I
think—" Falkenhorst hesitated. "Yes, you're
right, Tor-vald. But there must be some safety valve,
some outlet for them. I'd like to know what it is."
That was discovered two Earth days later.
Davenant was going through some maps in the library, checking resources of fissionables with Garson's help, when the Angel yawned and
stretched and said:
"Might's well quit now. Holy time comin' up, an' there'll be no work f'r
forty-eight hours."
"A
special service, do you mean?" asked Davenant, feeling the vague
discomfort which mention of religious intimacies always gave him.
"Yes.
Feast o' the Three Prophets. We have holy times once in a while, sev'rl times an Earth year." Garson hesitated.
"Why don't y' come, Hall? You look like y' could use some fun."
Some people have their own ideas of fun! thought Davenant. But the prospect had a certain
morbid interest. Doubtless it would be boring as a drill-mech. Nevertheless—
"Wouldn't
people mind?" he asked. "I'm not a member of your Church, after
all."
"Oh, no trouble. Stan' back to the rear at
first. Later on y' can join in all y' want." Garson smiled shyly.
"We might even convert you."
"Well—all right!" Davenant noted
the time and place and went off to his supper.
The
others of his band refused somewhat profanely to come near the service. They
preferred Kruse's idea of wiping the recorders with a magnetic field and
locking themselves in with some bottles.
Lyell approved, "If you want to go,
Hall, it's not a bad notion. The more we can learn about these people, the
better."
Davenant
changed to a clean dress uniform and went down a series of ramps and corridors.
As he neared the great assembly room, the crowd around him grew thick—commoners
streaming in from all parts of the city, men and women and children mingled
together. They were silent, but there was a curious eagerness on their faces.
The hall was a gigantic natural cavern which
had been enlarged until it could accommodate the entire population of X. It was
painted and tapestried into an explosion of color,
huge streaks and jags of green, purple, gold, blood-red swirling on the walls.
There were no benches, so everyone stood, but the floor was softly textured.
At
the farther end, rising out of semidarkness, was a sort of stage with an altar.
All the Angels in X seemed gathered there, rank on rank of them like robed
statues. The only Cine in sight was Weller, who sat on the stage between his
guards.
Davenant
found a place against a wall. The gray-clad Sergeants who crowded around hardly
seemed to notice the stranger. Their eyes were fixed with a curious greed on
the stage, and they breathed heavily. Music was coming from somewhere, archaic
syncopated stuff which caught at the pulse with a primitive force. Davenant
wondered at the feeling of lightness and elation that seemed to be rising
within him.
"O
brethren—" It
was all the Angels, a huge male chorus ringing like distant thunder between the
ends of the cave. "Praise
ye the Lord, in Whom all are one. Thank ye the Lord
for the gift of life and for His manifold mercies."
Effective,
thought Davenant. I wonder why? I've heard better in Luna City.
But as the chorus rose and
swelled, he felt an odd lump in his throat. The man beside him was weeping.
Organ tones pealed like the
voice of Heaven.
The sermon began, from the lips of an elderly
Angel who only yesterday had been discussing gas-diffusion processes with
Davenant. It started quietly enough, solemn as the music, with the Angel
reciting the virtues of humility and hard work. Davenant found it rather
reasonable.
Then the tempo picked up.
"An' yet who're we, mis'rable
wallowers in sin, that we should walk this world? We
who're slothful, an' greedy, an' lustful, we who's so blackened that only the
blood o' the Lamb can ever wash us clean? I say t' y' all, the Devil is waitin'I On the Black Planet which is called Hell he waits
f r us, he's ready t' lick us down his hot gullet, down into the lake of
eternal fire—you, an' you, an' youl Few are they who 11 find mercy in the sight o' the Lord, an' great is the wailin' in Hell—"
People
stamped their feet. Giant, dwarf, multiple-armed, tentacle-armed, the pure
human majority, they jerked, and moaned, and swayed with the rhythm of the
words. Music rose around them, a sinister harrying of notes gone wild, and the
Angel roared abomination down on them.
"Atnenl AmenI The Lord have mercy on me a
sinner!"
Davenant's
knees felt weak, his heart thick in his breast. He was doomed and done for,
outcast, alone, every shame of his life was rising to mock him and he gasped
with the pain of it. Everyone was groveling on the floor now, creeping toward
the altar, wailing their miserable little sins to the world. And he, he alone
was damned!
"Hallelujah!"
It took a minute before Davenant realized
that the shout had been his own. That brought him up short. A word screamed in
his brain, and he doubled up against the wall and grabbed for its support. Supersonics!
Or subsconics? He wasn't sure. He couldn't remember in the
confusion that bawled around him. But he knew that inaudible sound waves in the
right frequencies do strange things to the human nervous system. The take off
of a rocket gives a man a moment of irrational dread. There are combinations of
wave lengths which stimulate the thalamus, exalt the emotional response, while
suppressing the action of the critical, reasoning forebrain.
It
had been a standard part of psychotherapy for a long time. It was being used
here on a giant scale!
Knowing
it was a help. Davenant fought back toward sanity. He felt his heart pulsing
with the words that rolled around him, he was frightened and joyous and enraged
all at once, but it could be controlled. He licked his hps
and wondered how long he would have to hold out.
"Praise
ye therefore the Lord, for His mercy endureth! Give thanks and rejoice that He made yel"
Hang on, boy, hang on, stay where you are.
Iri the seething of the mob, it hardly seemed
incongruous that the Angels should suddenly be tossing out plastibottles.
One landed beside Davenant. He picked it up, unscrewed the cap, and tasted as
the others were doing. It burned in his throat. A hundred and fifty proof at
least!
The music rose with a triumphant surge and
thunder. He saw the nearest man turn, grunting, and snatch in a curiously blind
way at a woman. She struggled for a moment, as if against some dying fragment
of convention, then fell into his arms. He fumbled at
the sleazy material of her dress, lifting it as he forced her toward the floor.
So that's their safety valvel
A
hand plucked at his. It felt hot, and wet with excitement. Turning, he saw
another woman, pulling at him. Disordered hair streamed past a face which
glistened with sweat and contorted with laughter.
"C'mon, honey,"
she said. "Le's go."
He
shivered and stiffened himself. "No—no, thanks, he mumbled.
Arms were around his neck. Even in
low-gravity, her weight was dragging him down. Y're a
new un," she said. "C'mon, have some fun.
It's awright."
She felt soft and hot against him.
Helplessly, he stared down the open neck of her dress. Her hps
sought his, greedily. It was like an explosion inside him. He sank to his
knees and she laughed and pushed her body against his.
Wildly,
he wanted to accept, nobody would know, and— and—Glancing around, he saw that
the floor was littered with couples and that the younger Angels were leaping
off the stage to join the party. There was a tightness
in his throat and. a hammering in his temples; he'd been a long time without a
woman. Not
He
pulled himself free, shuddering. "Damn it, I'm an Engineer!" he
gasped, more to himself than to her.
"Wha's
the matter?" she demanded insistendy.
He
thrust her away. "No!" he said harshly. "Go find someone
else—"
Ugliness crossed her face. "Y* can't, huh?"
He
wanted to show her otherwise, but only shook his head angrily. She laughed unpleasandy and moved off. It took him a full minute to
recover his wits.
Davenant
looked up at the stage then. Weller was rising to go. Either he had superhuman
self-control or, more likely, there was a heterodyning vibrator mounted near
his seat. Custom had apparently required his presence, but—
Suddenly he fell.
His
guards swarmed around him. Peering into the shadows Davenant saw half a dozen
men under one of the high columns. They were dressed as commoners, but stood
aloof. He pushed closer, recklessly, and saw Halleck among them.
A
machine-gun chattered from the wings. Other Hounds came into view, methodically
mowing down Weller's guards. They were in the majority, they operated with
smooth coordination, and the whole fight was over inside a minute. The
survivors withdrew, bearing their wounded.
Halleck and his followers turned quietly and
left the hall. Davenant made out the faces of at least two Cincs
he had met. So several of them must have got together on
this. A group conspiracy would be the only way, probably, to get past
Weller's defenses. Now the junta would install a new Cine-one and—
Few
if any of the brawling crowd had noticed what went on. They were too busy with
their own affairs.
Davenant felt oddly
light-headed. It must be the aftermath of the sonics.
The only sensible thing to do was beat it back to the Engineers. He had no
business mixing into this bloody mess which was Jovian politics, but his own
impetus carried him along, his will gone.
Two
men on the stage were looking down at the bodies which littered it. One wore
Cine uniform, one was an Angel. Both were high-ranking, to judge by their
insignia.
Davenant
got down on all fours and crawled toward the stage. The pairs and groups
wallowing about him were cover of a sort. If he was noticed at all in the dim
light he might be taken for a commoner. Or he might get a bullet in his skull.
Near
the stage, he lay prone and called on his mental training. He had a degree of
conscious control over the involuntary functions, he
could drop the sensory barriers and heighten perceptions as some hysterics do
without volition. Just enough to hear what was being said—
In BasicI
The
shock of that turned his muscles rigid. For a moment, there was darkness
before his eyes. It faded, and he heard the Angel speaking:
"So
far, so good.
But will Halleck be more manageable?"
"I've
been his mentor since he was a child," answered the Cine.
"Consciously, of course, he distrusts me as much as does anyone else. But
I've made it plain that I'm not after the highest rank, so he will listen to
me, at least. And I know what buttons to push."
"Well have to proceed cautiously. A
whole culture can't be rushed into anything new." With a note of grim
humor: the Angel added, "We ought to know that by now!"
"Of course, of course. But we're doing all right. We've come a long way since Callisto. Pass the word around—conference at 1800 tomorrow.
Arrange it as an ostensible discussion of policy with regard to these
Engineers. Which it will be, in a way, though we want only
our people in on it."
"All
right. Ill send you an official
memorandum. Let's go."
They
walked off the stage. It was a long time before Davenant gathered himself
together enough to leave.
When he entered his quarters, Kruse looked up
with a rather bleared expression. "What's the matter, Hall? Seen a
ghost?"
Davenant drew a shaky
breath. "Yes. In a way."
Lyell stood up. "What
do you mean?"
"I
mean—" Davenant looked at the floor, then up again to meet their eyes with
a certain desperation. "I mean I've found out who
really runs Ganymede."
"Oh.
The service you went to? You mean the Angels are more powerful than they
act?"
Davenant
shook his head. "Cincs and Angels are played
off—manipulated. It's the Psychotechs from
Earth."
CHAPTER
5
Hubbis, Nemsis, Ate. So the old Greeks summed up the rise and
doom and fall of men. It is a formula which has gone through all history.
Much
partisan nonsense has been written about the Psycho-technic
Institute. It was neither the only savior of a reeling civilization, nor the
tyrant which strangled man's right to be an individual. It was a band of men
and women who for generations strove toward a high ideal, wrought mightily, and
at the last—as might have been foreseen—encountered problems they could not
solve. Somewhat as the medieval Church nurtured Western civilization, the
Institute was a land of placenta for Technic society.
In both cases, an outgrown matrix was becoming constrictive and had to be
broken, and in both cases the act of breaking threw
men back temporarily to disorganization and unreason.
The
tragic flaw in the character of Institute personnel was only that they were
human.
Scientific
method was first successfully applied to social processes in the nineteenth
century, when statistics were used to accummulate and
winnow data. The basic-theoretical approach was developed in the twentieth
century along several lines of attack—games theory, communication theory, general
semantics, the principle of last effort, and generalized epistemology.
The
original Psychotechnic Institute eventually absorbed
all similar groups. Devoting itself to study, it came up with some fundamental
equations describing human relations. The approach was that of field dynamics.
Its discoveries about the psychometrics of the individual were of even greater
ultimate importance, but centuries would pass before those bore full fruit.
What
counted around 1970 was a precise formulation of certain basic laws governing
the action of groups.
No one pretended that the
science was perfect; it had to admit large probable errors. But it was
immediately usable, and the world of 1970 badly needed a guide.
Governments
had long been relying on experts. It was only natural for them to continue
doing so. As time went on, the Institute's leaders foresaw the growth of their
own power, but they did not snatch after it. It came to them of its own accord,
because only they could formulate policies for a world still wounded and
feverish, policies which had a reasonable hope of success.
And
so, step by step, came the economic recovery and improvement of all Earth
through: The strengthening of world government; the slow withering of
nationalism; education which, for the first time in centuries really fitted
the needs of the individual and of his society; the gradual decline of
population on an overcrowded planet; the effective conservation of natural
resources; rational economics; sane penology; generally available psychiatric
care; and critical thinking.
It
was not easy. There were setbacks, ^terminable debates, deadly undercover
struggles—but the foundation was being laid.
The
reasons for the final breakdown of this progress were complex, but three main
threads may be traced. First, there was a deep cultural resistance in a
majority of Earth's population. As Asia became more and more the economic
center of the world, this unwillingness gained power. The road was, after all,
long and hard, and it involved the scrapping of traditions which had existed
since prehuman times. In many ways it went against
animal instinct, and peoples without the technological bias of the West were
inclined to draw the line somewhere and stick by it.
Second,
the bulk of humanity simply was not fitted to absorb the new attitudes. Cold
rationality and a high degree of self-abnegation do not come naturally to
ninety-nine percent of the race. Individual psychology suggested ways to get
around this, but there was no way to recondition a billion and a half human creatures en mass.
Third, there was mass unemployment on a scale
never seen before, as computers, automatons, and semi-volitional machines
replaced men on one continent after another. Not only the unskilled laborer,
but his highly trained brother and the routine intellectual—clerk, recorder,
librarian, local administrator, laboratory assistant, the expert, some
thousands of professions—was no longer needed.
The process took a long time to near completion,
and there were many attempts to alleviate its effects, but nothing, not even
the great emigration to Mars and Venus, was enough. At the nadir of the
situation only some twenty-five percent of the adult population of Earth was
even partially employed.
Of course, no one starved, a citizen's
allowance was enough to assure living quite comfortably, but the genius class
which could still work and get extra money for it was hated and envied. Yet the
geniuses had to be paid, or not enough of them would have accepted the
positions which still had to be filled by humans.
It
is not good for a society when most of its citizens have no vested interest in
its smooth operation. The atmosphere of restlessness and despair tainted even
the leaders.
Out of all this rose
Humanism, which amounted to a desire to restore a streamlined version of the
entirely imaginary "good old days". The Institute was shocked by the
rapidity with which the movement grew. It was made the more dangerous by the
general availability of superdielectrics, accumulators
of fantastic capacity which could be charged from almost anything; cheap,
simple energy sources for vehicles and weapons.
The balance of niilitary
power was shifting away from central government and toward the small, fanatic
group. It was no longer possible to enforce order.
The
Institute had had its own secret rnachinations before
this. There was, for instance, the inoculation of a precal-culated
percentage of cost free synthetic food supplements with chemical contraceptive,
followed by specious public explanations of the falling birth rate. There was
the quiet subversion of the most inflexible archaist organizations. There was
much more, which had been deemed necessary but could not go through the process
of democratic agreement.
The
new situation was ugly. Anti-robot riots; the lynching of technies
and scientists; the election of intellectually corrupt representatives—lunacy
was building up as rapidly and unnecessarily as—to quote a classic example—it
did in the old world on Earth between World Wars H and III.
The Earth sections of the Union government
were calling less and less on trained men, going back more and more to rule of
thumb. Something had to be donel And
the field equations did not indicate a solution.
There is no reason to detail the increasingly frantic efforts of the
Institute's leaders to stop the avalanche. Some of their methods were actually
unlawful, and when this was exposed the results were evil. The naval mutiny,
the Humanist Revolution and seizure of power, the withdrawal of Earth from the
Solar Union—these are matters of record.
The
Humanists soon found out, though, that they could not repeal history, could not
abolish the technology on which men were now dependent. Mars and Venus backed
the counter revolution. The shaky Regents were overthrown and the new
government rejoined the Union—but the seeds of interplanetary rivalry and
distrust had been sown.
"Tame"
Psychotechnians could not be dispensed with, but
their powers were rigidly limited. The generations to come would be turbulent,
one might call them the adolescence of Technic
civilization—an age of trial and error for such men of good will as groped
toward a new and better basis for living. An age of conflict
and greed for the short-sighted majority. But an age
with a peculiar hectic brilliance of its own.
Analogies to post-Reformation Europe are
tempting, but should not be drawn too closely.
What
is of interest now is that at the time of the Revolution some of the Institute
chiefs and their followers decamped to save their own lives. They had managed
to seize an ecological-unit spaceship—it was the old Starshine,
in orbit around Earth after completing the third expedition to Neptune—and had
taken it into outer space.
No
one knew why they did not go to Mars or Venus, as many of their colleagues did,
nor was it known what had become of them.
Mankind
in general had too much else to think about to worry over a few hundred
refugees.
"Politics," Lyell said when Davenant told him
what he had discovered. "We stay out of this."
"Even
if there's a—danger?" asked Yuan. "If the Psycho-techs get this
system organized just the way they want, it could well become a menace to the
status quo."
"As a scientist of sorts, you ought to
be pretty sympathetic to the Psychotechs,"
retorted Lyell.
"Maybe, maybe. We need their skills. Could be Earth's made her biggest mistake to date
in booting them out. On the other hand—I don't know." Yuan frowned unhappily.
"I think I follow you," said
Yamagata. "Groups, organizations, tend to lose sight of their original
purposes, don't they? The means to an end become an end in themselves. Look,
oh, say at the Christian Church. It started with a noble ideal, maybe the
noblest man has ever seen, a universal brotherhood of love. After a few
centuries, it was burning people alive for disputing its authority."
"That
took longer than you think," said Lyell. "But I won't quibble. It may well be that Psychotech
people have become embittered and fanatical. Their connivance in political
murder today suggests it. Nevertheless, we don't let on that we have any
inkling they're here. We proceed as usual, report the facts secretly to the
Abbey, and let the Coordinator and Council decide what to do. If the Engineers
don't stay out of affairs such as this, they'll end up as exactly the same
kind of power-grabbing, intriguing bunch of crooks. Our job is to keep the
scientific spirit alive. To reform planets, not people."
"Of course," said Falkenhorst, "the Abbey will want more facts than just
the bare statement that—"
"Yes, yes. Keep your eyes open. But
don't go playing spy. You haven't the training or
aptitude, and the Cincs are experts."
"So
are the Psychotechs," observed Kruse. "You
realize that everything we've said in Basic, fondly imagining no one understood
it, is known to them."
"Uh-huh.
From now on, we keep the wiper going per-manendy in
here. Let them wonder why. Also, it's about time we started demonstrating a few
things we can do. . . ."
The
announcement that Weller was dead and that Halleck was the new Cinc-one came toward the end of the holy time. An added
twenty-four hours of circus was proclaimed to celebrate the accession. The
Sergeants took it stolidly; they must be used to such sudden changes of
masters.
Davenant
continued his fact-finding in the library, since he wanted to see which of the
Angels normally there excused themselves to attend
the special conference. It was a shock when Garson was among them. That fumbling, blushing, stammering nonentity?
On
second thought, it fitted. The Psychotechs weren't
interested in an outward show of power. They concentrated on getting into key
subordinate positions—the men who gathered data and wrote reports, the men whose
advice was valued by the policy makers. The Jovian rulers, a curiously
innocent breed in spite of their mercilessness, could not be expected to know
just how powerful the executive secretary of a committee was, for instance,
especially if that man had the sense to be unobtrusive about it.
This
also would explain why Garson had so casually accepted the Engineers' feats of
instant comprehension and memorization during their studies. To him, that was
the least part of mental training.
But
had he, then, invited Davenant to the service with the intention of having him witness the assassination? If so, why?
While the Angel was absent the Engineer took
the opportunity to look up the historical files. There wasn't much about the
original settlers of Calhsto. They had merely claimed
to be adherents of the outlawed Technic Party who had
tried to establish themselves on the satellite and had failed because there
weren't enough skilled spacejacks a-mong them.
They
had joined the Ganymedeans under an agreement which
gave them all Angel status, permitted familiar contracts to remain in force,
and left their big ship and their own personal property. That must have taken
shrewd negotiation, but of course their leaders had been experts. Some had
soon been given Cine rank, and the younger generation among them was being
raised in the orthodox Jovian manner.
Still, Davenant was pretty sure that they
arranged for their own children to be picked for special training, and for
their women to get the more privileged jobs. There was no secret police here,
for the society was too rigid to require one. A close-knit brand of
conspirators could maintain itself without much trouble.
Now
that he knew what to look for, Davenant could easily find the signs of their
influence. There had been some radical changes quietly made in the past
twenty-five years. The Sergeants were no longer undifferentiated mass, but had
been divided into grades, of which the higher echelons got a respectable though
strictly utilitarian education.
The newer outposts had been organized under
different lines from X and from each other. One was staffed entirely by
Sergeants who had a regular family life, another by experimental mutant types,
still another by Angels, and all under the very eye of the Church. A diveristy of cultures was breeding which must in time clash
with and destroy the Church's petrified overlordship.
The terraforming project itself was probably a Psychotech idea.
So
far, so good.
Davenant had every sympathy with the notion of
undermining Jovian society. But he wasn't at all sure about the ultimate aims
of its new, hidden masters.
Some
three Earth days later, the Engineers went out into the field. They didn't
bother unloading their ship, but jetted her directly to the camp site, a feat
of piloting which must have made some eyes bulge.
A
party of Angels and Sergeants, with a few Cine bosses and their Hounds, arrived
by motor sled to find camp already being established. It was a whirl of
movement and action, with a score of swift sleek robot machines erecting shelters
and workshops, guided only by men at the main control boards.
"Y're
gonna drill here?" Garson asked timidly.
Lyell
nodded. "I think this is a promising site for one of the H-Li burners.
Well take cores down to a depth of fifty kilometers and find out for
certain."
"Fiftyl" Garson gulped. "Won't a shaft that deep—y
11 have to make it pretty wide, too—won't it cave in?"
"Not in this gravity and with this type
of rock," said Lyell. "Anyway, it'll only be wide at the bottom,
otherwise just broad enough to lower parts which our robots can assemble down
there. It'll take longer to warm the surface with the fires burned that deep,
but be far more economical in the long run. Also, right now we still have to
find out just how much native heat there is at the satellite center and how
available it is."
A
self-operating 'dozer walked around a selected area, scooping away rubble with
casual giant shrugs. A slim steel skeleton rose above it, and Davenant and
Kruse hooked in the boring rig and a minimal nuclear engine. They could have
done it faster if their Jovian subordinates had been trained for such work.
Falkenhorst set up his furnaces in one of the workshops
and began turning out synthetic diamonds for drill bits.
Yamagata's
laboratory worked overtime analyzing the sections brought up. "Yuan pored
over -the results and announced that a biological approach to the atmosphere
problem was not impossible.
"Of
course we can't mutate from protoplasmic life," he said.
"Theoretically we could make animals, but they'd have to have heat
producing cells to keep from freezing solid, and we want unicellular organisms
that can multiply like mad. Rather than wait till the satellite is warm enough,
I'm going to have the Abbey labs turn out some different things, which can live
here as conditions are, getting rid of the poisons and releasing oxygen as
natural metabolic functions. Liquid ammonia in place of
water, for instance."
"Y'
mean y'all can make
life?" Garson sounded
shocked, and Davenant reflected what a good actor he was. The datum could
hardly have been unknown to him, for synthetic virus antedated the Humanist
Rebellion by more than a century and a half.
"Sure."
Yuan peered at him from a stack of calculations. "Whole bacteria were
assembled long ago. It was just a matter of reproducing and accelerating the
chain of physiochemical reactions which led to the first life on Earth. Oparin had sketched that out as far back as 1930 or so.
Nowadays we can tailor synthetic bacteria and protozoa to almost any
requirements. The limiting factor is merely the extremes of temperature between
which such complex reactions as make up life will go on." He smiled.
"Nothing more than microscopic organisms have been made yet, and I see no reason why humans should ever be produced
synthetically even if it is possible. Nature has a much more interesting way of
achieving that result."
The Cine who was with them looked doubtful. "It soun's
blasphemous," he muttered. "Only God—"
"Oh, call it straight organic chemistry if you want to,"
snapped Yuan. "Just don't bother me now. I've got work to do."
The
Cine flushed darkly, and Davenant could almost read his thoughts—You damn slant-eyed—
Garson
stammered a question which defdy turned - the talk
into safer channels.
"Well
have to set up an iron mine near here," declared Lyell. "You
understand that our construction is only a portable testing rig, and that most
of the terraforming materials will have to be
manufactured on this world. According to your maps, there's a deposit not far
off. . . . Let's assemble some workers and go take a look."
The
look involved driving shafts kilometers into a mountain. Blasting was of little
value in the tenuous atmosphere, and Davenant used atomic energy to melt rocks
loose, after which the diggers lumbered monstrously to clear away the rubbish.
"How d'you control the reaction?" inquired Garson. "I never
thought anybody'd ever make atomic burners that
small."
"Damping fields," said Davenant
abstractedly. "Anti-radiation fields, too. It's the same development of
wave mechanics as has produced the molar potential barrier and the
friction-less wheeldrive. In principle, these gadgets
tap some of the reaction itself through field baffles. Lead shielding is obsolete
except for special purposes."
"Oh."
Garson's eyes rested on Davenant. Behind the faceplate, his countenance was a
mask. "So y' can damp, shut off a reaction from outside?"
"Of course. How else could we bum, say, hydrogen and lithium instead of just
blowing them up?"
The team went on to another site. Lyell used
the opportunity to go into space and check with instruments.
"A
big ship there in a low orbit, all right," he said. "Must
be the Starshine. She's cold as charity, too. No one aboard."
"Emergency exit for our Psychotech friends." guessed Kruse. "No point in
leaving her there, rather than breaking her up for scrap unless she's fully
equipped. So when they came to Callisto, they must
have had Ganymede in mind all the time."
Yamagata
nodded. "These people never did anything at random. When the debacle came, they must have
figured their best chance to get back in the saddle lay through Jupiter. Mars
and Venus have too much contact with Earth for them to operate secredy."
"But
the people who came out here—" began Bavenant.
"They knew they'd never live to see their plans mature. Why that
tremendous sacrifice for a time long after they were deadr
"People are that
way," said Yuan.
"What
worries me is their ultimate plans," said Falken-horst. "Those here now must realize that
they've little or no chance of persuading the inner planets to reinstate them
by using sweet reasonableness, or even some obscure socioeconomic
manipulation. And the Institute did advise war from time to time as the best
solution. Like when they got the old U.N. to put down the Venusian
nationalists by force. I have an uneasy notion they plan to make Jupiter a—Prussian state, and then under the guise of
Jovian conquest . . . with modern weapons, it wouldn't be pretty, whether they won
or lost."
Kruse
said, "They always preached against war except as a last resort. The Venusian campaign was a small affair. I ought to know—my
great-great-grandfather was a U.N. marine who fought there and setded down afterward."
"But
attitudes change," declared Lyell. "The psychody-namic
technics are only methods for attaining given ends.
They say nothing about the desirability of any aim. If the Institute people
have acquired an old-fashioned power hunger, they'll rationalize it to
themselves, but they'll be as dangerous as any would-be conqueror." He
shrugged. "Out of our province, though."
The initial survey took a little over three
months. Then the expedition returned to X to make preliminary evaluations of
data and plan the attack on Callisto. Terrafonning Ganymede certainly looked possible. The
question still was whether or not Jovian society was able to avail itself of
the possibility. The answer to that involved further sociological study.
"If
the Psychotechs think it can be done, I'm inclined to
agree with them and let it go at that," said Kruse. "They know this
moon better than we ever will."
Lyell
shook his head. "In the first place, we have to keep up the pretense of
not realizing the true situation," he replied. "It could mean
trouble if they found out that we do know. In the second place, the Abbey would
want an independent opinion anyway. In the third place, how do you know they want the job done? Our trying and failing might
be what they really have in mind. It could have a psychological impact, a
disappointment and bitterness, which they could very well exploit."
Davenant
felt again a chill of foreboding. He wasn't fitted for this atmosphere of unsureness and hostility and dark cross-currents. A wave of
homesickness for the clean bare slopes of Luna and the comradeship of the Abbey
nearly overwhelmed him.
He
wondered what the Cine spies thought of their suddenly blanked recorders. The
natural interpretation would be that the Engineers had discovered the hidden
instruments and had simply chosen this means to express indignation. But how
natural was the Jovian mind?
He
returned to the library. There was littie he could do
at present except soak up as many facts as possible, for the Academy's experts
to take from him later. And the long, quiet chamber was the only place in X he
really liked.
Garson
looked up from a projector as he came in. There was no one else present.
"God with us," he said shyly.
Davenant
nodded and sat down next to him. "What are you studying now?" he
asked.
"I'm
s'posed to be educating myself in metallurgie
theory, so I can work better with your team. Traid
it's not my strong point."
Davenant
looked at the projector. It had what seemed like an unnecessary number of controls.
"Why those?" he asked, pointing.
"Oh, that's t' save spools. One tape can
hold a lot o' diff'rent texts, same as one phone line
can carry a lot of diff rent messages. These buttons are t' unscramble, an'
select the one I want."
"Hmmm—"
Davenant hoped his excitement didn't show. "That's a novel idea. When did
it come in?"
"Oh,
'bout fifteen, twen'y years ago. Why?"
"J-j-j—" Davenant swore at himself
and brought his tongue under control. "I was just wondering."
But
he knew now where the Psychotechs kept their secret
records! Right here with all the others, safely
scrambled in with a code modulation known only to the conspirators. Best place
on Ganymedel
The
Angel sighed and looked at him steadily. "You know, don't you?" he
murmured—in Basic.
"Know?—"
For an instant, Davenant failed to understand what Garson meant. Then shock
held him rigid.
The
Angel smiled. "Why bother, Hall? It sticks out ten kilometers. Ever since
you started blanking those spy machines, and some of your questions, the way
you react to key statements, almost the way you walk. You know who we
are."
"You—I don't get it.
What do you mean?"
"Never mind. This isn't a very safe place to discuss such
things. Just tell the others what I've said, and quote me to the effect that we
don't care. It was foreseen that a group of alert, intelligent outsiders,
corning here especially to study this place, would most likely discover our
secret. The probable reaction of your order has already been estimated and
allowed for. I wanted you to see that religious ceremony and assassination, to
realize more fully what a brutalized culture this is and how right that it
should be taken over and changed."
The
mask was off. There was no more hesitation, no more awkwardness in Garson. It
was a mature and calmly assured man who spoke.
"I
know we've been party to some nasty affairs, like the last change of dictators.
Well continue in that line for a while, because we
must. Just remember that our ultimate aim is still what it always was—to
establish sanity so firmly in all men that that sort of thing will be forgotten
and impossible."
Davenant
sat unmoving. Garson returned quietiy to his book.
It
might have been minutes later, or nearly an hour, when the tramp of boots rang
in the corridor outside. Davenant glanced up from the screen which he had been
mechanically studying, and saw the door fly open. A dozen Hounds made their
entry. Long, low-gee jumps ranged them around the wall, with guns pointing
inward. A black-clad Cine-three followed them.
"Don't move," he said. "You're
arrested."
"What?"
Davenant leaped erect.
Three staring muzzles followed him. "What in Sol-"
"Hands
up!" snapped the Cine. "Conspiracy 'gainst
the Church's a ldllin'
matter."
Davenant sucked in his breath and willed steadiness back to his shaking
form. His mind leaped with an unnatural clarity.
"You can't arrest me," he said.
"I'm a Planetary Engineer. Our contract with your government, which has
the force of a treaty, gives us immunity."
"Can't I,
though?"
Davenant shrugged. A tiny germ of panic
crawled deep in his skull, but his voice lifted coldly.
"The
Order protects its own. If you molest me in any fashion, they'll hear of it at
once on Luna. We have our methods of communication."
Sheer
bluff, but he counted on the scientific illiteracy of the Cine class, and the
awe which his team's work in the field had produced. "How would you like
to have your brain burned out from space?" he went on. "What defense
have you against robot bombs sent clear from Luna? If you don't let me go back
to my quarters you'll soon find out that the Order is not helpless."
For
a moment the Cine hesitated. "Don't do it!" screamed Garson.
"There's women an' children herel"
That worked. The Cine detailed three Hounds
to escort Davenant back to his suite.
Four
of the other Engineers were already there. Kruse showed up later, arrogandy demanding that the guards outside the door let
him in. He had been set on by three Hounds down in the main power room, but he
had also been involved in clan feuds on Venus as a youngster. From his tunic
he extracted guns and passed them around.
"What brought it
on?" groaned Yuan. "What's happened?"
"I've
got a hunch." Davenant set up his testing rig and checked the room
circuits again. "Yeah. Halleck's idea, I'll bet.
He's not stupid. See this pip? That's a metallic mass in the adjoining suite
which wasn't there before. When we started wiping his tapes, he must have set
up an oldfashioned groove-cutting mechanical
recorder. He's heard everythingl"
"And we thought we were safe, and didn't
bother to speak Basic most of the time," mumbled Yuan. "He must be
pretty damn sure of the situation. So now he's setting out to arrest all the Psychotechs on Ganymede, and us along with them."
"What will happen to us?" wondered Falkenhorst. Sweat beaded his face, but the voice held an
iron calm. "Will they dare take action against members of the Order?"
"Probably,"
said Lyell in a thin tone. "We're safer for him dead—we know too much. He
may call Hall's bluff and execute us officially. More likely fake an
accident." He scowled. "What to do?"
Kruse
shrugged. His face was taut and pale, but he spoke with a sharp note of
laughter.
"We've got three guns," he said.
"We're used to higher gravity than this. We can catch those sons of Hounds
outside by surprise. Pick up whatever equipment here you think we'll need. The
only thing for us is to break out of herel"
There
was only a moment's hesitation, as they weighed the meaning. Lyell nodded.
"I hate to do it, but . . . Let's go."
He,
Kruse, and Yuan, the best shots, took the weapons. The rest loaded equipment on
their backs. Kruse flattened himself against the door and opened it just
enough to peer out, into the faces of three Hounds.
"Boo," he said.
The
nearest guard scowled and reached for his gun. Kruse snapped three shots.
"Come onl" he yelled, and flung the door wide.
The
Engineers burst Out into the corridor, stumbling over the bodies.
Davenant stooped to pick up a gun for himself, and heard the whine of a bullet
cleaving the air where he had stood. A corps of Hounds was trotting down toward
them.
"Out of here!"
roared Lyell.
They backed, laying down a curtain of fire.
It seemed a miracle that there were no hits, but they were distant, moving targets.
Davenant wasn't afraid now. He hadn't time to be. He burst around a corner,
almost into the arms of another Jovian guard.
His
fist leaped of itself, the blow shocked home and he saw the man lurch back with
his face red. Coldly, Davenant kicked him in the belly,
and behind the ear as he went down.
Run! His breath was raw in his throat as he fled with the others, down an
endless labyrinth, always down, toward the garages. He didn't see the action
behind him as the three gunners turned to fire back. Once Falkenhorst staggered, grabbing at a shoulder which was
suddenly wet. Davenant threw an arm around the man's waist,
and they struggled on together.
Now—the garage entrance. In the confusion, it was un-watched. The Engineers went through,
closing the massive door and dogging it behind them. A couple of mechanics ran
up to protest. Kruse waved his gun.
"Back,
or you get it in the guts!" he snarled.
There
was a long row of sleek small rockets, ready and waiting. Lyell entered the
nearest.
"Kruse,
Davenant, Yamagata, aft to the engines," he clipped. "The rest stay
with me. Be ready to take over piloting if I don't last."
"I hope those mechs
stay buffaloed." Kruse's teeth flashed white. "We've used up all our
ammunition, you know."
His big form wriggled into
the crowded engine room.
"Where
the devil will we go to?" asked Yamagata. "This boat isn't
interplanetary."
"I don't know. The Oudaws
in the hills, I reckon, if we can find them. What counts right now is getting
clear of X."
The auxiliary motors purred, turning the
rocket's wheels. "It slipped down the corridor and up the airlock ramp. It
was useful, having enemies indoctrinated out of all initiative. No one had
thought to cut off the automatically opening valves.
As the boat emerged into dark bitterness,
Lyell saw space-suited forms swarming across the ground.
"Not a chance to get to the Light," he said. "Stand by to lift."
The rockets flared, tossing the boat skyward.
Lyell headed north, switched on the auto-pilot, and began scrambling into one
of the space suits. The rest did the same. None was a particularly good fit—a
suit should really be individually built—but they would do.
Stars
glittered in the forward view-ports. Falkenhorst
slumped with closed eyes, color drained from his face. Yuan studied the
radar-scope. His voice floated back to the thrurnming
hotness of the engine room, over the intercom:
"Someone
coming after us."
"Yes,
I see him now. Police rocket, and this thing hasn't a
gun to its name." Lyell's voice held a groan.
Davenant
did not see what happened. He felt the sudden shock and thunder, felt the hull
reel around him and drop like a murdered seraph. Air whistled through the hole
amidships, and the unbalanced gyros howled.
"Hang
on!" bellowed Kruse, slapping down his helmet. "Hang on and
pray!"
They
struck with a sundering crash which jerked Davenant's head almost off his neck.
Darkness whirled before his eyes.
When he came out of it, Kruse was looking
emptily through the engine room door.
"They're gone,"
he said. "It killed them."
Slowly,
Davenant crawled from the ruin. The boat had come down in a long glide,
smashing itself into a land of bare mountains and reaching snowfields. The
three men forward were dead.
Yamagata went out through the hole torn in
the boat's waist and looked skyward. A distant red flare streaked south.
"They aren't landing," he said.
"Be almost impossible to do in this country, and they'll be needed at home
and won't figure on any survivors lasting long."
"Which we won't," Kruse answered
dully.
"We
can try!" Rebellion lifted in Davenant and brought his head erect.
"Well lay these men out as well as we can, and then—"
"Yes?" asked Kruse. 'What
then?"
"We start walking," said Davenant.
That
was how it had started. Now Davenant and Kruse stepped and glided. Two dead men walking across the face of hell.
CHAPTER
7
The gauges said that about thirty minutes of oxygen remained.
If it had not been for Yamagata, Davenant and Kruse would have suffocated
already. They could stretch out their lives by sitting still, but there was no
point to that.
A
ragged edge of hills cut across the face of Jupiter like teeth of blackness. Their
shadows streamed enormous before them, hard and sharp over the broken ground.
Outside the shadows, there was a rush of light from the primary, chill amber
which sparkled frostily off solid ammonia fields and flashed from the ice
glaciers in another sawbacked range. When Jupiter was
close to full, its radiance was enough for human color vision, though the hues
had a dreamlike distortion.
Near
the banded giant, no stars were visible, they were drowned out. When you looked
away, you could see them over the sharply curving horizon. They glittered
through the tenuous, unbreathable air with a cruel
wintry brilliance.
Even
carrying his own weight of suit, oxygen bottles, capacitors, and other
equipment, a man was light when gravity was less than a fifth of Earth's. You
learned walking all over again, the first time you were on a low-gee world—a
long, flat glide which ate the kilometers.
You
learned to gauge distances when thin air made an object seem closer than it
was, while a near horizon tried to make it see farther. You learned to check
every joint and valve and connection on your suit before venturing out, when
the least failure could choke you, explode you, freeze you solid in minutes.
And you learned to have death for a companion!
The
minds of the two surviving Engineers had grown so dim with the steady slogging
that when the gunshot came it almost killed them. Davenant saw a spurt of snow
and chipped ice before his feet and stared at it in a dull kind of wonder. He
didn't hear anything except the whisper of wind past his helmet, for the air
was too lean. Another slug pocked the low bluff to his right.
"Down!" yelled Kruse. "They're
shooting at us!"
He nose-dived for the ground, and a bullet
whipped past the spot where he had stood. Davenant followed a movement of
blind instinct. Ammonia-crystal snow feathered up to blind his face-plate, he pawed at it while his body tried to dig itself
into rock.
Kruse touched helmets with him. "Radio silence, man! They may have a direction finder.
We've got to speak by conduction. No, this way—" He led an awkward
belly-crawl toward the nearest of the litde craters
which scarred the valley floor.
Davenant
shuddered. For a moment he was uncontrollably afraid, his muscles knotted
immovably against the expected leaden blow. Then, the very condition of
hysteria triggered reactions which had been built into his mind during his long
training. Suddenly he was without fear, his body keyed to a high adrenal pitch,
his thoughts like cold lightning at night. He slipped after Kruse and wallowed
down into the fluffy snow which filled the crater.
The Venusian hunched low, snarling into the
empty sky.
"If they pin us here for another half hour, we're done," he said.
A black outline showed above a ridge of ice,
just for a second before ducking down again.
"Cincs?" asked Kruse. "Have they tracked us down
after all?"
Davenant
considered. "No. If that were a Cine, we'd be
dead by now. He'd have an infrared 'scope on his rifle,
and even with our heaters tuned down to where I'm glad I'm not a brass monkey,
we'd show up like a bonfire against this temperature."
The
big man blinked, a little surprised at Davenant's coolness. It would have
surprised Davenant, too, if he had had time. He was fumbling with his pack,
getting out the general unit which the discipline of years had made him carry
from the wreck. General units were expensive, and Engineers were supposed to
save money for the Order whenever it was humanly possible.
"Oudaws, then," said Kruse. "And how the devil are
we going to convince them we're friendly?"
Slowly
Davenant's thick-fingered gloves worked on the unit, plugging in jacks and
turning dials. It ran off his own capacitors, and took
its time about warming up in the Ganymedean chill.
He
answered Kruse abstractedly. "We're not friendly with the Oudaw, you know. We're only trying to establish con-tach out of desperation, and—" A flicker appeared on
the screen. "Here we go!"
A
man in the field, who might have to work hundreds of kilometers from camp,
couldn't pack twenty different meters and detectors. He needed a single device,
rugged and portable, which could be adjusted to perform twenty different
functions.
Davenant
had simply connected the thermopile with the galvanometer, blinkered the lens
to provide sharp directionality, and come up with an infrared spotter. It
wouldn't direcdy show men crouched behind rock and
ice, but it would show rising currents of air, heated by their suits.
Cautiously, he swept it around the horizon.
"Two," he said after a minute.
"One's sitting over in back of that ridge, the other circling behind us. I
think he wants to get a vantage point from the top of that bluff and shoot down
at us. Now, any ideas?"
"Mmmm—yeah. Let's get the circler.
His friend won't be able to see what happens. We can get up on the bluff fast
and wait for him."
A
few minutes later, the Outlaw—he could be no other-crept over a final rise and
toward a position where he could look down into the valley. A large form sprang
on him from a crag, pinioning him. Another leaped at the same time from the
nearly impenetrable shadow of a cave, grabbed the leads from his capacitors,
and yanked them out before he could send a cry for help.
The man struggled wildly. It was hard for
Kruse to hold him, here where weight counted for so litde.
Davenant got out his pliers and unscrewed the short aerial of the Outlaw'
helmet radio. Only then did he plug the capacitors back into the suit circuit.
Kruse's helmet was tight against his
prisoner's. "We don't want to cut off your juice permanently and freeze
you," he said, "but we might have to unless you behave yourself. . .
. Get his gun, Hall."
Davenant could not hear that, but he had
already picked up the weapon. To his surprise he saw that it wasn't a rifle, after all, but some land of bolt-action smooth-bore, obviously
homemade, though it used percussion caps. He covered the Outlaw until Kruse got
some wire and bound the man's ankles together. Then the Venusian
took the gun and stood up.
"I'm going after the
other fellow," he said.
"Isn't
that—dangerous?" objected Davenant.
"Of
course, but look at your oxy gauge. We haven't many minutes left,
at the rate we've been using the stuff. And I've had stalking experience back
home, which I doubt you have. See if you can talk this one over."
The
tall figure slipped down the ridge and was lost to sight.
Davenant huddled beside the captive, touching
helmets. He heard only hoarse breathing for awhile, and looked into a gaunt,
hook-nosed face nearly hidden by long, tangled hair and beard. The suit, he
noticed, was an old model, and bore signs of much handmade repair.
The
Oudaw subsided a little. He could have thrown his
arms around Davenant, but he could not have held the Engineer for long. He sat
back with animal
patience to wait a better
chance.
"Who
are ye?" he asked. His English was barbarously accented, but clear
enough. "Be ye gardamn Cincs?"
"No. The Cincs
were after us. We were looking for an Outlaw community where we can get help.
We're men of the Planetary Engineers."
That
conveyed nothing to the man, but he nodded grudgingly. "Ye're no Jovian, I see. Earth?"
"Only
in a way. My
Order exists apart from any planet.
We
work for all. But the Cincs hunted us down,
anyway." Davenant paused, decided a half-truth was his best bet. "We
want revenge on them. Perhaps your people can help."
"Mebbe new Cine trick." It was a savage growl, with a lifetime's
bitterness in the words.
"We
want to be shown to your village. Let us talk to your chief or whoever—"
"No! Die first."
Davenant
smiled nastily. "I don't see any signs of motor transport," he said,
"so you must have walked from your home. You must have at least enough oxy
to get back on. If necessary, we'll take your bottles for ourselves and follow
your trail. But we'd rather let you guide us."
"Not enough oxy. We got caches, ye never find, ye die too."
"At
least," said Davenant mildly, "well die trying." He was faintly
surprised at his own ruthlessness. But the Order came first. More persuasively
he went on, "What harm can it do if you guide us? What could two men do
against a whole village? We have news for your chief which will make him glad.
You have nothing to lose."
The Outlaw lapsed into a
sullen silence.
After
awhile Kruse came back, prodding another man before him.
"I
sneaked behind and got the drop on this'n," he
explained. "Now what should we do?"
Davenant
examined the weapon taken from the new captive. It was a sort of spring-steel
crossbow shooting metal quarrels. In this gravity and air pressure, such a
device would have plenty of range. It could easily pierce a suit of space armor
and the man within it. The main drawback would be the low rate of fire.
His respect for the Outiaws went up another notch.
"First," he said,
"we take these boys' spare oxy bottles for ourselves. My air's getting
thick. Then we talk them into guiding us, or if they won't we leave them
here."
It
took some persuasion before an agreement was reached, but then the trek got
started. Once the men tried to lead them astray, but Kruse, who had spotted the
faint signs of their earlier passage, forced them back onto the true trail.
It
was a long walk, and Davenant felt weak with hunger toward its end. He thrust
the awareness out of his mind and whipped his flagging body into new energy.
Once they stopped at a carefully disguised cairn and took out some fresh oxygen
containers. There must be a lot of caches spotted throughout this country.
That would explain how the Oudaw patrols managed to range so far.
Davenant wondered with a certain chill what
would happen when they reached the village. He had heard stories about these
barbarians which, even allowing for exaggeration by their enemies, were not
reassuring.
CHAPTER
8
Neak
the north pole of
Ganymede, the Godwin Mountains rose steep and cragged, tormented black walls
which shimmered darkly under the radiance of Jupiter. A monster system of
glaciers capped them, spilling down gashed ravines and across the lower
plateaus. The yellow light was cold on their slippery backs.
Kruse, Davenant, and their prisoners halted
between two peaks which thrust above the ice and covered them with shadow. A
slope fell away beneath them to a narrow, craterlike depression, and on it
they could see the outlines of human figures.
"Let's go," muttered Kruse.
"No!"
One of the captives spoke in a harsh whisper. "Services goin' on. Sentries'd shoot
us first, check later. We gotta wait."
Squinting against the chill unreal haze of
Jupiter light, Davenant saw that the people below were drawn up in ranks,
facing a block of native stone where half a dozen worshippers were going
through ritual gestures. Poking his helmet aerial forward and tuning up his
radio, he caught, faindy, a deep-voiced chant:
God-home, God-home, hear our askin'. See, we stand with sacrifice—
Shocked, he looked southward, and up to the
enormous face of the planet. It was at the full now, sprawling tremendously
across heaven, the Red Spot like a single watching eye.
"Is that your god?" he breathed.
"God is in Jupe
and Jupe is in God," answered the barbarian
with a peculiar note of reverence in his voice.
O Zeus, could you know! Davenant imagined Olympian laughter ringing
hoarsely through the mountains.
"They
caught a man in the last raid on Y," said one of the prisoners.
"Look!"
They could see a man struggling in the grip
of four others. A tiny puff of freezing vapor came from him, he went limp, and
was hurled up on the altar stone. Davenant retched.
Forcing his mind back toward an impersonal
clarity, he wondered about the development of Outlaw culture. How long ago had
their revolt and exodus taken place—eight years? That didn't seem like time
enough for this much degeneration.
But then, Ganymede wasn't
Earth. The psycho-social effect of alien conditions had yet to be measured.
Huddling, hiding, waging a doomed war for three or four generations, the hill
men would rapidly have forgotten their intricate, highly specialized
civilization. The barrenness and cold of the landscape would have entered their
souls.
He
turned over what little he had learned about them in X. A religious colony
forced to alter its ways of living and thinking in order to survive, forced yet
further by prophet-dictators whose "revelations" had involved radical
social change and increased their own power. Yes, it would be unstable, it would have its Old Believers.
The
introduction of controlled mutation had led to mutiny and civil war, the dissenters had been defeated and fled into the
wilderness. There they had hidden, skulked, and raided lonely settlements.
Without books, without leisure, they would rapidly have become barbarians. The
stories about cannibalism and human sacrifice seemed justified, but Davenant
tried hard not to think of them as the monsters they were considered to be.
They were human beings, lonely and desperate and driven close to madness, but
they had the same potential as anyone else.
Besides, he thought, it was pretty obvious
that the Cincs had been pulling their punches in the
war. A concerted effort could have wiped out the hillmen
long ago, but an external enemy was too useful.
"Seems to be breaking
up down there," observed Kruse.
They
waited until the scene was deserted, then moved cautiously down the slope and
across the open ice. One of the Outlaws spoke with a note of glee.
"Might's
well put down yer gun. Ye're covered
now."
Sweat
trickled along Davenant's ribs. He tried to look into the farther shadows, but
they were too dense.
A voice in his earphones said, "Stand
where ye bel"
A
quarrel chipping the glacier near his feet added emphasis. They halted and
stood waiting, their hands aloft.
Three men came into view, weapons leveled. "That ye, Gil? Fooled 'em
here, eh? Good going!"
"We—"
Davenant licked his hps. They felt sandy. "We
came here on purpose. We're not Cincs or Hounds.
We're from Earth, and we want to see your chief."
There
was a skeptical silence. One of the new arrivals picked up the dropped gun and
crossbow and touched the Engineers suits. .
"Not Cine make,"
he grunted. "But they're clever devils."
"All we want—"
"I know, I know. Shuddup.
Yell get yer chance—mebbe."
As
Davenant walked up the farther ridge, with guns at his back, he saw half a
dozen figures appear with—brooms, by space! He felt a mental wobbling until he
realized they were carefully smoothing out footprints and all other trace of
the recent crowd around the altar.
There
was no path. Slipping and stumbling, groping through blindness of shadow and
dazzled by Jupiter's radiance, the party made a slow way through the crags. It
seemed a long while before they were halted by other sentries. There was a
low-voiced colloquy, and then the two Engineers were herded toward a cave
mouth, a great gullet of blackness in an overhanging cliff. A machine-gun nest
was dug in just beyond.
The
passage fell rapidly downward, a reaching gloom where flash beams were pale
fingers and echoes sounded hollowly even in this ghost of an atmosphere.
Davenant could make out enough branch tunnels to wonder how anyone ever found
his way here. Like all small, rapidly cooling worlds, Ganymede was riddled with
caves.
After
another lengthy and silent walk, they found an airlock door. It seemed to be
from a spaceship. There was another defensive emplacement before it, and
another discussion with the guards. At last they were sent into the lock
chamber. The pump was old and rickety, it took a long time to flush out
Ganymede's air and replace it with a thin oxygen-rich mixture. Davenant's
helmet was frosted over and blinded him.
"Awright. Through here—stop—take off yer suit."
Davenant
and Kruse stripped down to the form-fitting coverall which was standard underpadding. Kruse was dirty and tired, skin drawn tight
across jutting bones, a thick stubble of red beard on
his jaws.
I suppose I look just as
bad, thought Davenant.
There
were several Outlaws about them, gaunt, undersized men in worn coveralls. Some
of them wore ornaments-hammered copper rings in nose or ears. All carried
daggers which seemed to have been beaten out of native iron. They were more
interested in the captured airsuits than in the
prisoners.
"How about seeing your
chief?" asked Kruse.
"Take yer time," muttered someone, and spat.
Kruse
bristled. "Look here," he snapped. "I told you we were from
Earth. In fact, we're Planetary Engineers. You probably don't know what that
means, but believe me, it's important. We have word for your chief which he'll be glad to hear, but if you don't treat us right
the Order has means to make you do it."
That seemed to impress them a little. One of
them traced a grimy finger over the suit, apparendy
impervious to the chill which was still on its exterior.
"Not
Ganny make," he said. "Mebbe
they be really from Earth." He spoke as a man at
home might have spoken of Avalon.
"No weapons," said one of the two
whom the Engineers had taken.
"Of
course not," Davenant said loftily. "I tell you, we belong to the
Order. Do you think we need to lug hand guns around?"
"Well—" A hill man scratched his
tangled whiskers. "All right. Come along."
Two others fell in behind, with cocked
crossbows. The rest trailed after, their eyes lit by a dull curiosity.
The caves and tunnels here had been little
improved save that fluoros were strung to illuminate
them. Davenant decided that a section of the caverns must simply have been
blocked off, with airlocks installed here and there, heated, and ventilated. No
system of tubes for that—there must be only a few power fans mounted near the
oxygen renewal plant. The air felt dank and stagnant.
The
populated section was a series of narrow tunnels in which shallow caves had
been chipped or blasted. Ragged curtains served for doors. When one or two of
these were drawn aside as someone came out, Davenant saw a pathetic bareness
within, a few boxes or stones for furniture. The dwarfish, near-naked women and
children who swarmed and chattered around the convoy seemed unnecessarily
dirty. Behold the nobel savagel
"Can't
be more than a few thousand," muttered Kruse. "Is this all the Oudaws there are?"
"I
suppose so," answered Davenant. "I heard in X that there were several
such villages once, but that only one was believed still to survive. If the Cincs didn't get them, something went wrong with the air
plant or the power or—"
His
revulsion was becoming an enormous pity. They couldn't even surrender, these
poor starveling troglodytes; X had no use for them except as a unifying, ineffectual
enemy.
Further
along, they passed a communal kitchen. Steam pipes from the nuclear plant had
been laid to heat food which seemed to be mostly synthetics.
The
passage debouched on a wide cavern at whose farther end was a real door, native
iron. A clumsy idol of black stone loomed before it, and two men armed with
modern rifles—presumably stolen—lounged nearby on guard. There was a jabbering
conference, and one of the sentries ducked inside.
Kruse switched to Basic to speak to Davenant.
"Have you any idea what we're going to tell the grand high panjandrum?"
he asked.
"Depends
on what he's like," said Davenant. "It had better be good though, or
well end up in a stewpot."
The
guardsman reappeared. "In," he grunted. As several pressed behind
offering to cover the prisoners, he ordered, "No, just them two."
When
the door clashed shut, Davenant had to struggle to suppress his astonishment.
The chief seemed to own a suite, several rooms formed by plastiboard
partitions. There were carpets on the floors, chairs and tables, a shelf of
books. The man who stood before them was tall for an Outiaw,
his long gray-shot hair and beard was neatiy combed,
his overall faded but clean. Three women, presumably wives, scutded
out of sight.
There
was a silence. "From Earth?" asked the Oudaw
ruler at last.
"Yes." Davenant
moved forward.
A pistol leaped into the
man's hand. "Easy," he warned.
"We
don't intend violence," said Davenant. "We jumped your scouts because
they attacked us, but spared their lives. All we're after is a chance to talk
to you."
"Awright. I'm Roberts-John, boss o' Jupiter City. Come
in an' siddown."
The Chief led the way to a sort of living
room, found himself a chair, and clapped his hands. One of the women brought in
a tray of water and synth-dough.
It
was a shaking effort to nibble sedately at the food instead of wolfing it. The
chief asked the Engineers their names and went on to some shrewd questions
about the inner planets. Then he came to the point:
"Why re ye here?"
"There was—trouble with the Cincs," said Davenant. He was faintly surprised that
he should take the lead, but Kruse was sitting back and saying nothing, eyes
half shut with weariness. "We have to get in touch with the Abbey—with our
Order, the Engineers. So we came looking for your people to help us."
"Lucky chance for ye,"
said Roberts-John. "We'd never 'a found the city 'thout
our men to guide. It's well hid."
Davenant drew him out on that subject. He
learned that the original mutineers had fled in some of the smaller spaceships,
after wrecking others which might have been used for pursuit. The old American had long ago been broken up to help build X.
Now
and then the Oudaw outposts had had to fight the
Hounds of the Lord—the warrior corps which had since been recruited from exogenes—who had come in ground vehicles. But the confusion
left after the mutiny, and the damage done by it, had given time enough to
establish this village and hide it well. The nuclear power plant of the
spaceship in which this colony's founder had arrived had been moved
underground—compact and shielded as it had been, that had meant a heart
breaking job to furnish energy. Likewise her chemical air renewer
had been removed. Indeed, most of the vessel had been utilized. A
food-synthesis unit had been taken along as well as other equipment. " Ice had been mined, some of it electrolyzed for
oxygen. In general, the builders of Jupiter City had repeated the pattern which
had made X, although on a smaller scale and under immensely greater
difficulties. Raids had later furnished more materials, fuel for the atomic
engine, tools, fabrics, weapons, and supplemental food.
This
place radiated heat, but not enough to be detectable through the overlying
rocks and glaciers. It contained plenty of metal, but scattered iron deposits
confused magnetic locators. As for visible surface traces—Ganymede was large,
and the Godwin country was some of the wildest and most rugged on the
satellite.
Davenant
could fill in a good deal of history for himself. He had read how the first
generation here had been skilled engineers, but because of the shortage of
books, the impossibility of proper instruction, most of their knowledge had
died with them. Hereditary monarchy had been inevitable —one family supported
by the rest, with leisure to learn, by rote, the operation and servicing of the
machinery on which life depended, and with an intelligence sharpened enough to
make basic decisions. The rest merely obeyed orders and spent their lives in a
dullness relieved only by work, fighting, and the orgies which followed
victory.
They
had their religion—which had been corrupted into sheer paganism—their taboos, a
few songs and stories, their dimming traditions. Otherwise there was nothing.
"I'd like to see your power plant,"
said Davenant. "That sort of thing was my special job at home. Without
expert care, it will sooner or later fail." A bribe.
Roberts-John
seemed to know it was. "What d'ye want of
us?" he demanded again. "S'posin' we 'greed
t' help ye, what c'd we do?"
"That," said
Davenant bleakly, "is what I am wondering."
CHAPTER
9
Kruse
spoke up then, and told of
all that had been happening to the survey party of Engineers. Robert-John
nodded, saying little. How much of it he really understood was a question.
Davenant felt a stinging in his eyes. Lyell, Falkenhorst, Yuan, Yamagata, they had all been so close and
dear to him, and now they lay dead in the snow. They sprawled frozen on the
face of the moon, their burst eyes gaping sightlessly at Jupiter and the great
wheel of stars. Their bodies were blocks of ice, their brains held only a
hollow and everlasting darkness. Farewell, my brothers!
Davenant
shoved such thought away. Time later to mourn. He was
still alive, and he had a mission. He had eaten and drunk in this oddly
civilized home of a barbarian king, and now he had to start planning.
"Ye can jine
with us," suggested Roberts-John. "We can always use a tech. Mebbe when your friends come from Earth, ye can get in
touch with 'em."
Kruse
rubbed his chin. "How about that, Hall? I can't
say I fancy turning cave dweller for the next one to five years, but it may be
the only way."
Davenant shook his head. It did not occur to
him that he had taken the leadership. But there it was again.
"*Not good enough," he said.
"The Cincs may destroy this nest at any time, or
they may decide to abandon the terra-forming idea, which presumably originated
with the Psycho-techs. In which case well never get off this moon. It's more
than us, Torvald, though God knows I don't want to
play hero. The Abbey has to be told. How can the Abbey plan if it doesn't have
the facts?"
Kruse
gave him a sour grin. "All right, then. What do you plan on doing?"
"Let's
first take a look at your power plant here, Chief Roberts," suggested
Davenant. "I'm not sure I like those occasional flickers in the
lighting."
Kruse showed a moment's surprise. He knew as
well as the younger Engineer that the cause was nothing worse than a faulty turbogenerator. Clamping expressionlessness
onto his face, he nodded and rose.
"I think Hall may be
right," he said noncommittally.
Roberts-John looked
alarmed, and led the way out and through a descending series of tunnels.
Davenant's general unit, adjusted to Geiger registry, showed more radiation
than there ought to be, though not enough for real worry. Faulty
shielding.
He traced that quickly. Some of the lead
blocks in front of the reactor had slipped, perhaps in one of the frequent
moonquakes caused by the tidal pull of Jupiter. Otherwise the power plant was
in fairly good shape. It had been well constructed, and had been tended with
care.
He shook his head dolefully and glanced at
the row of meters, remote-control dials, and instruments. "Do you know
what these are for?" he asked the Outiaw ruler.
"Some of 'em. When this here needle gets near th' red line, I pull out that
there rod, an'—" The chief went on to reveal a scanty, barely adequate
empirical knowledge of maintenance.
"I
thought so." Davenant pointed to a gauge whose indicator was well past
the red. It showed merely that the original slugs were sufficiently enriched
with new isotopes to be worth removing and replacing. "How long has this
been that way?"
"Long's I c'n remember. Ye don't think—"
"I
do. The hypewangle isn't dreel-sprailing
with the camits. Lucky for you that the effect builds
up slowly, but I wouldn't give this thing another five years of life unless
something's done. Look!" Davenant tapped a few buttons, emergency manual
cutoff. Needles wobbled across the dials and the lights went out. The chief
roared and sprang for him. Kruse held the frantic man back until Davenant had
restored functioning.
"Don't
do that!" Sweat drained from Roberts-John's
face and he shook uncontrollably. "Don't do it!"
"I
was only testing the hypostat," Davenant said
mildly. "It doesn't fantangle as it should.
Unless you let me make some badly needed repairs, you'll be frozen to death in
a few years."
"I—I—I—"
Roberts-John' gulped. Mastering himself, he asked with a savage bark, "How
d' I know ye re not a Cine sent t' wreck th'
whole town?"
"Ill be here, too," Davenant pointed out. "Give me
a few days
and 111 have this thing purring. . . ."
By the end of that time, though, Hall
Davenant was close to being the absolute ruler of Jupiter City. The man who straightened
out the reactor, fixed the electric generator running off it, and cannibalized
a dozen dead helmet radios to produce half as many operating ones, inevitably
would be.
Roberts-John was too proud to be obsequious,
but too intelligent to resent a better
man for the job than he was himself. Behind his mane and beard was a clever,
queerly altruistic personality. Davenant found it rather embarrassing to turn
down his offer of temporary wives. It wasn't morals so much as appearance and
cleanliness. Kruse was not as fastidious.
The
Venusian regarded him out of a grease-smudged face
and said in the Basic they used here between themselves, "Nice going, But now what?"
"Now,"
said Davenant thoughtfully, "we'd better find a way to reach the Starshine."
"Huh?"
"Of course. Unless you have some scheme for recapturing
the Light or grabbing X's one deep-space cruiser, it's
the only craft in the Jovian System capable of reaching Luna. The Psychotechs didn't have a chance to escape with her. . . .
How badly wrecked is that rocket we fled in?"
Kruse closed his eyes and summoned up eidetic
memory. "Maybe it could be repaired," he said at last. "I don't
think anything is too badly damaged. Of course, you're assuming the Jovians haven't salvaged it yet. . . . No. I see it now.
The boat runs off chemical fuel and isn't designed to get far from the surface.
Even in perfect shape, it couldn't get up to the Starshine's
orbit. Thrust's too low by a factor of—um, I'd say between one and a half and
two."
Davenant slapped the shielding of the town's
reactor. "This baby once ran a pretty good-sized spaceship. Lots of energy there."
"And I can just see
our hosts letting us take it."
"Not
at all. I
was thinking of a power-beam."
"Huh? Nobody's ever
run a rocket off a power-beaml"
"There's
always a first time. Let me think, now. . . . How's this sound? When you get
out there with your salvage party, scrap the whole drive system and replace it
with a king-sized tank for water, a power-beam receiver, and an electrical
hookup. The idea will be to boil water around superheated coils, blow it out
the rear past an ionizing arc, and use a linac system
to accelerate the ions still further. Essentially a crude
version of the present-day space drive. The whole thing will run off a
beam from here. Naturally, you'll have to give the boat a feed-back signal to
keep the beam aimed right.
"That,"
said Kruse, "would make good continuity from some stereo serial, but you
know as well as I do that it calls not only for construction from the ground up
but for design —and we haven't much more than a slide rule in this place. I'm
not Chief Scientist Young of the Junior Intergalactic Patrol."
"You are an Engineer," Davenant
said quietiy. They got to work.
The
job was not quite as fantastic as it sounded. They were aiming only to get off
a small world with negligible air resistance, and not even to leave its gravity
well entirely. The principles involved were familiar to both, the basic design,
standard in such midget craft as the asteroid scooter.
There
was a good deal of machinery from the Outiaw's
original spaceship, stored away for ultimate use as scrap. The colony had no
projects calling for multielement vacuum tubes, astrogating robopilots,
high-voltage arcs, or a hundred other parts.
Davenant's
idea was easy to draw up, even to make some elementary calculations about. More
than that, a Planetary Engineer had training for his profession such as had
never been seen before. He didn't have to stew for weeks before seeing the
answer to a problem.
His subconscious mind
collaborated all the time.
In about two revolutions of Ganymede, the
plans were ready. And the parts and tools which would be required were loaded
up.
The main difficulty was testing. There just
wouldn't be any way to get all the bugs out.
Whoever
piloted that boat would have to hope it stayed in one piece for the few hours neededl
Kruse
took out a gang of men, dragging sleds piled high with equipment and supplies.
Davenant stayed behind to supervise the construction of a power-beamer.
When he told Roberts-John what he wanted, the
chief exploded.
"No I" he cried with horror.
"But-"
"Nol Twas bad enough taking so much of our stuff for fixing that
boat."
Davenant had had to promise all sorts of
benefits which the Order would supply in exchange. But Roberts-John still shook
his head.
"We can't spare the men neither, not really," he said. "Somebody's got to watch the
passes leading here." He tugged at his beard. "Now ye want to stick
up a mast that'll yell to the Cincs where we are. Uh-uhl"
One bony hand fell to the
gun at his waist.
Davenant braced himself.
There was death here unless he could talk over the chief. . . . Talk the whole Oudaw population over, in fact.
"It would be removed as soon as it had
been used," he countered.
"S'pose
a Cine boat happens over before, huh?"
The
Engineer took a deep breath. He'd rather expected this reaction. Now it was
time to play his one lonely ace, and play it with a flourish.
"You've seen what I can do with what
little you have here," he declared slowly. "That's a big ship we're
aiming for, crammed with equipment." He was gambling that she had not been
gutted, but the notion that the Psychotechs had kept
her for emergency use argued that her holds were still pretty full. "How
would you like it if we ended the Cine menace? We could do it, you know."
Roberts-John
goggled at him. It took a long time for Davenant to put the idea across. . . .
The
beaming mast grew swiftly. It need only be a skeleton of spare girders welded
together according to plans the Outlaw mechanics—after all, they were capable
of maintaining something as intricate as an airsuit—could
easily follow. The casting and controlling units took more work. Davenant almost
forgot what sleep was like. He knew exactiy how to
build a rig sufficient for his purposes, but improvising the different parts
and assembling them was a nightmarish task.
The
caverns were in one white flame of excitement. They had known they were doomed,
these people, had known their long struggle was hollow. The sudden prospect of
an end to it made them all a little crazy.
Davenant
dared not tell them what a fragile chain their newborn hopes hung from.
Kruse
returned in two revolutions. "She's ready, as far as I can tell," he
said. "It was mosdy the bows that were
wrecked—not too much repair to do actually. Rebuilding the motor was the tough
part. Think coils made with a tolerance of fifty millimeters are going to work?
They tested better than I'd expected, but—"
"Of course, 111 have to pilot in a spacesuit. We didn't stop to seal the cabin and put in
air units, but if she hangs together at all it ought to be possible to ride
her."
"Ill
pilot," said Davenant. "I know more about electronic systems than you
do."
"Mmmm—you're
risking your neck on a mighty thin chance. Toss you for it."
" 'They also serve who only stand and wait', Torvald.
Roberts-John is determined to keep one of us a hostage. It won't be pleasant for
that one if this fails."
Kruse
grimaced. "All right. You're the pilot. You're
younger, anyway, faster reactions, and this boat is going to need a lot of
human handling to make up for its own deficiencies."
CHAPTER
10
Space
was a great frosty
darkness strewn with a million cold suns. The enormous crescent of Jupiter
blotted the Milky Way, as if drinking a stream of stars. The sun was far and
small and heardessly brilliant.
Davenant's
gauntleted hands were numb on the controls. Blast off had been automatic. No
space vessel can be flown by a merely living creature and arrive where it wants
to go. His part had been only to aim her nose in the precalculated
direction, punch the firing button at the right time, and hold it down the
proper number of minutes. When the abused gyros began to hunt, he had had to
compensate with his free hand on the manual control wheel. That was all, but it
was nearly enough to break him.
Now the jets were dead and he was falling
upward, seeking an invisible object whose orbit had been computed roughly from
eidetic memories of incomplete observation. If the calculations were too rough,
he would eventually spatter himself over the cratered face of Ganymede. The
rickety craft would not let him come down alive.
If
he got outside the cone which his power-beam could reach, he would be helpless.
He hadn't far to go—less than a thousand kilometers from the surface, a couple
of hours' jaunt in an airboat on Earth—but space was cold and quiet and very
large.
He
waited. He thought of many things, in a dreamlike part of his mind remote from
that which watched the radarscope. He was aware of being chilled and cramped,
hungry and thirsty, dull with fatigue and strain, but it all seemed far away
somehow.
There!
A pip, just sticking over the nose-level! It grew as he stared, off to one
side. He was going to pass it at an estimated hundred and fifty kilometers. He
switched power back on, fought the wobbling gyros as they brought the boat's
nose around. He had to aim, not where the ship was now, but where it was going
to be when he got there. His only instruments were the radar, the clock, his
eyes, and the mathematics drilled like reflexes into his brain.
Fire!
The ship was visible, a tiny splinter against
heaven. Another computation. He'd pass it by some
twenty kilometers, going much too fast—vector in this direction—fire, and hope
his estimate hadn't become obsolete in the time needed to make it.
Fire!
Turn eighteen degrees. Fire!
He
passed within a kilometer, relative velocity something like fifty KPH. No use
trying to maneuver this cranky wreck any closer. He gauged speeds and
distances, thankful that he'd done freefall work before, unbuckled himself, and
stepped to one of the holes which gaped raggedly in the cabin. Then he jumped.
He didn't quite make it. Almost, he spun past
in a long orbit which would have frozen him to death before it smashed against
the satellite. But he was carrying an extra oxy bottle for that emergency. Its
jet wasn't much as a reaction gun, but he rode it back to the Starshine thinking hysterically a-bout witches on broomsticks. When his magnetic
boot soles clamped to the great hull, he swayed for a long time in a faint.
Recovering, he looked around through blurred
eyes. Ganymede's grim pock-marked face bulked tremendously over the edge of
the ship, seeming to dwarf even Jupiter. Shuddering, he groped cautiously in
search of an entrance.
The
airlock cycled for him. Good ship! He patted the metal with a lunatic giggle.
They built those long range fellows to last. They had to, with years spent on
some of the outer planet expeditions.
It
was utterly cold and dark inside. He floated through many levels, his flash
beam a wan puddle of radiance in the smothering black, to find the engines. Still running, still running, at minimum output.
Good!
Good! He turned them up, and air and light and warmth began slowly filling the
empty hulk. When it was safe to take off his space suit, he looped himself to
the nearest stanchion and slept the clock around in complete exhaustion.
When
at last he awoke he inspected his prize. The food synthesizers were still in
working order, but needed recharging with chemicals which were in the
storerooms. He didn't bother, contenting himself with opening some plastis and gorging.
Fighting the sleepiness that followed, he
searched for lifeboats. Yes, there were four, sweet little craft though somewhat
obsolete. There was a complete laboratory for all phases of planetographic
work, a machine shop, an electric shop, a wealth of spare parts. Davenant felt like wallowing in that splendor of tubes, wires, and
optically perfect reflectors.
No, not Down, boy.
You've got work to do.
First, a lifeboat to fetch Kruse and some Oudaw
assistants. It
was a temptation to get just the Engineer, for the two of them could take this
ship home. But Roberts-John was no fool. He'd hold them to their bargain at gun
point if necessary. So—
How
did you go about conquering X with an army which the Hounds could annihilate in
half an hour?
It
would have to be bluff, Davenant decided. With the help of the lifeboats, the
Outlaws could move unsuspected almost to the gates of X, ready to take over if
its garrison could be made to lay down their arms. To do this, he would have
to—yes, build a damper field generator. Against it, the Jovians
would have no defense, for they didn't realize its limitations. When the lights
went out and the air began to grow cold and stagnant, they should be ready to
talk business.
If
they didn't capitulate?
Davenant shrugged. One worry at a time, please. . . .
CHAPTER
11
They must be mad with fear down in X. Davenant's
thought of them rioting in the dark was gruesome, but he forced it out of his
mind. He sat now in a lifeboat, hunched beside the radio. From
time to time the auto-pilot fired jets to bring the craft back as its orbit
took it out of communication range. He had contacted the Jovians and they had sent for Halleck as ordered; now came
the tough part.
"Hello,
up therel Whore y'all? This's
Cinc-one. Whatcha
want?" Halleck's voice was vague and distorted, for the Jovians had only their capacitors now to furnish power, but
Davenant could hear the rawness of terror in it. "What've y' done?"
"This
is the Order of Planetary Engineers," said Davenant. "You were warned
not to molest our men, and instead you murdered them. We've come to settle that
account."
"I-I-Nol 'S a he! Accident-"
"Shut
up. One of our spaceships has a damper field beamed on your city. As long as we
keep it going, your power plants won't operate, and you'll die when your
capacitors give out."
That was not true. There was no way to beam a
damper field nor did it have much range. In point of fact, Kruse and an Oudaw gang had moved a boat with an improvised field
generator nearly to the walls of X. But Davenant had acquired a fast education
in diplomacy.
"That's
the least of what we can do, so you'd better accept our terms without
arguing."
"What y—want?"
"Are any of those psychotechs
you captured alive . . . ? GoodI Fetch me Angel
Garson. Fast!" "But-"
"For
your information, Angel Garson has just been made the temporary Cinc-one of Ganymede, so treat him with respect. I'll talk
to him as soon as he's available. Jump to it!"
Davenant
couldn't help feeling a little ridiculous. He was being so completely out of
character. Not that he didn't have other weapons, but
he hated the thought of bombing the city.
Another voice reached him.
"Hall? That you up there?
My God, man"
"How'd they treat
you?"
"Oh,
I'm still alive. Drugs got my information out of me. They didn't have to use
torture, and we were being kept as labor for a proposed penal colony. But how
in all the hells-"
Davenant
said in Basic, "Look, Garson. I'm speaking for the Engineers now. Somebody
has to dictate terms to you wolves, and I guess we're elected. Do you think
that given an allied military force, you could maintain a fresh government in
X for a few months?"
"Y—y—yes." The Angel's swift poise was a measure of the man. Davenant felt
humbled, had no relish for playing conqueror. Garson went on, "Knowing whatll happen if they don't obey your orders, I'm pretty
sure the people will cooperate. I can institute a propaganda campaign, if I like your ideas."
"All right. Here's what I want." Davenant forced himself to snap it out.
"Cincs and Hounds will be disarmed, but no
revenge taken on them unless they break the new law. We can't afford to make
them desperate. Oudaws will enter X and have police
and administrative powers. Your Psychotechs can
advise them, but their chief has the final word. I'm giving him strict orders
to maintain the status quo till we send a real task force from Luna. So none of your tricks—because all the psychodynamic equations in
the universe won't stop a damper field or a lithium shell.
"As soon as possible, an Engineer
delegation will get to you and reorganize on a more permanent basis. What I anticipate
is a fairly open society—as nearly as can be with these poor distorted
people—working toward eventual human normalcy. The interim government will be a
mixed commission of Engineers and Jovians. A strict
constitution will be written, and the Order will stand guard for a long time to
let the new political habits take root.
"Meanwhile,
terrafonning will go on, the Order to be paid for
that as well as for its adrninistrative services.
Once you've got a livable world, I don't think this type of occupation statute
will be needed any more, but that's quite a ways in the future.
"I know your Institute group has its own
plans; whether good or bad, I can't say. But you're only human and not to be
trusted with absolute power. Some day, when this system is well up, you might
decide to fight a war of conquest with Earth, and not even the Engineers can
stand by and do nothing while that possibility exists.
"You'll
be free to educate and propagandize openly, like everyone else. But the
commission is going to be alert for any cabals, so don't figure on taking over
from within again. That sound agreeable to you?"
"I—" Garson
laughed shakily—"I suppose it has to. . . ."
There
was some time required to get things established. Under the threat of the
damper field, the Sergeants were cooperative enough, though rather bewildered.
Davenant was well aware that the Psychotechs knew he
was bluffing a-bout an Engineer fleet out in space, but since their own lives
would not be safe until the Outiaws had marched into
garrison X, Garson's men had no choice but to work with him. After that, it
would be too late for Cincs and Hounds and Institute
people alike.
Considering what a long score they had to
settle, the barbarians were remarkable well-behaved. Nevertheless, a few
incidents made Davenant feel ill. But had he had any alternative?
Kruse
voiced the real fear when the two were again alone, driving the Light back toward Luna.
"Do you think the Abbey will agree to
all this?" he asked. "We've made an awful lot of commitments for
them."
"I don't think they can do anything but
follow out my promises, at least in a general way," said Davenant.
"It's not only a matter of prestige and the ultimate safety of all
mankind, but . . . how else are they going to get that terraforming
contract?"
"And
we've plunged the Order into politics to its ears," said Kruse.
"How much choice had
we?"
"Damn
little, I reckon. Still, it's interesting to speculate whether we'll be flayed
alive or merely boiled in oil."
"Most likely
cashiered," said Davenant.
He felt heartsick at the thought. For him,
there was no other life.
His
moody eyes searched the mfinite heaven, looking for
Earth.
EPILOGUE
The
Coordinator of the Order of Planetary Engineers was old,
but the eyes in his seamed face were still brilliant and he spoke with a young
man's resonance. As he sat behind the great desk, a window in the tower framed
his white hair with stars.
Send him in," he
ordered.
"Yes,
sir."
The guard, unarmed but husky, went out, to
come back with the prisoner. A nod from the chief dismissed him. There was a
long silence.
"So," said the Coordinator at last,
"you've been playing, politics, have you?"
The prisoner bit bis
lip. "You have my report, sir," he answered.
"And you've presumably
had instruction in the rules."
"Sir, there are
historical precedents—"
"The Council and myself
are empowered to draw conclusions from them," said the Coordinator
frostily. "Not a wet-eared tech. Besides all the excuses in your report,
have you anything to say for yourself?"
Bitterness
lashed back. "Sir, it was a matter of saving lives. Also, if I hadn't done
what I did, we wouldn't have the contract now. The rules also say something
about men in the field exercising independent judgment, don't they? A job is
more than a problem in machinery and natural resources. People are involved,
too, and they're the only reason the work is being done at all."
"Somewhat
emotional," murmured the Coordinator, "but not without a certain
spirit." He ruffled the papers before him. "I've been looking at your
psych record. Promising. You can be trusted with
further education."
"Sir?"
"Rules
are crutches, son." The Coordinator leaned back in his chair. "Go on,
sit down. I won't bite you. Not very hard, anyway. As
I was saying, rules are valuable for people whose power of really efficient
independent thought is limited to the mechanics of their profession. We've got
to have regulations. But they don't cover every possible case,
and the man who can break them when necessary and get his assignment finished
because of that violation, is a man we need.
"You
did a hell of a good job out there. Officially, now, you're going to be sent in
disgrace to Venus to do some low-grade manual labor. That sentence is for three
years. Pretty stiff, eh? But actually, son, you're going to school—a little
school we've got hidden away for future members of the Council."
"I-I-"
"Don't try to
talk," said the Coordinator. "Right now, it makes you look too much
like a fish. Son, the present system has been in effect for a long time. The founders
knew that the Order had to preserve the appearance of staying out of politics,
of being above all local quarrels, if it was to accomplish its mission. They
also knew that it would not always be possible to remain aloof. As you just
said, jobs also involve people. So from time to time we've stepped in, as
quietly and with as great a show of reluctance as possible. The rules keep us
from getting too deeply committed to local, temporary affairs. The rule
breakers keep us operating.
"If
your own violation had been botched, you would be
on your way to a labor camp—unless you preferred a dishonorable discharge. As
it is . . . well, after a decent interval youll be
skippering a crew of your own, and later youll be
elected to the Council. Maybe you're going to end up behind this desk. We'll
see."
He
grinned. "All right, consider yourself properly dressed down, and put on a
hangdog look. Youll be on your way tonight. Good luckl"
They
clasped hands. The prisoner wheeled and stepped smartly to the door. It opened
for him and he was gone.
Coordinator Hall Davenant sighed, an old
man's envious sigh. Memory ran back over a waste of years, to a night when he
had walked across the snows of Ganymede. It had not even been a dream, then, that he would sit behind this desk, but if it had occured to him he would hardly have been able to wait.
And now he had it, his highest ambition lay
in his hands for him to do with as he would. But men were walking across the
snows of Pluto while he sat here.
Some day the Solar System wouldn't be big
enough for them.
Briefly, he looked out to the cold challenge
of the stars. Then he returned to his work.