Arcturus Landing Read online

  “What’re the odds?” retorted Mal. “What’s the alternative? I told you what Thayer told me. We’ve only got twenty-four hours to live anyway.”

  “I tell you—” Sorrel was insisting when the creaky voice of Bobby cut across his words and the fat man shoved himself to the front of the group.

  “Lemme hear this,” he said. “I want to hear you lay it all out. And if it works, we’ll buy.” He turned to the dark man beside him. “Now, you keep your mouth shut, Sorrel.”

  Sorrel subsided. The rest of the Underground was silent. Mal took a deep breath and started in again.

  “Look,” he said. “My drive is not a drive. It doesn’t actually move anything. It just suddenly changes it from one spot to another.” A slight, confused murmur whispered through the crowd. “All right, all right, I know it sounds like a paradox, but just take my word for it, please. The point is that with something that just stops being in one place and then comes into existence in another, it doesn’t have to be built like a ship. It can be anything. It can even be this warehouse we’re in right now.”

  A snort of outraged disbelief came from the rear of the crowd. Bobby looked over his shoulder once and there was silence again.

  “Now, this warehouse, like every other one on the plateau, has all the necessary materials to build the drive; and, if we work hard enough, we can set it up in a few hours.”

  “Yeah?” said a voice. “How do we know you got a time limit from Thayer, anyhow?”

  “Okay, Harmon,” said Bobby, without turning. “You can go back and sit down now. What else’s Thayer got to do but what Fletcher says he said he’d do? He’s not going to risk being responsible before the Federation for this.” And he pointed to Peep.

  Harmon, or whatever his name was, shut up. “Well, how about it?” asked Mal. “We leave here and show up on Arcturus. The Aliens will look after us and we can get Peep to a doctor. One of his own kind.”

  “All right,” said Bobby. “So far. Now tell me. Can you hit Arcturus right on the nose with this thing?”

  “Why—” Mal felt his enthusiasm suddenly falter. “Well—I can. I mean it’s possible, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Well,” said Mal, “you’re right. The trouble is, I’d have to know first where it is in relation to where we are right now.”

  “Figured as much,” said Bobby. “In short, boy, you need a navigator just the same as if you were flying an ordinary ship.”

  “Yes,” said Mal dully, “you’re right. I didn’t think …” His voice trailed off in disappointment.

  “Well, don’t look so beefy,” said Bobby. “We can get us a navigator.”

  “What?”

  “Sure,” replied Bobby. “We got our own spaceship terminal off in the swamps. There’ll be two or three navigators sitting around out there.”

  “That’s a great help,” put in Sorrel.

  “Now, you hush,” creaked Bobby. “Mal, you can take us straight up about a thousand feet with just what you know now, can’t you?”

  “Of course,” answered Mal. “Why, sure! As far as the plateau was concerned, at night like this, we’d just vanish.”

  “That’s it,” nodded Bobby. “And from there on, we go where we want. Well?”

  “Well, what?” asked Mal.

  “Well, what do we do first?” said Bobby.

  It was a jury rig to end all jury rigs, put together by the untrained hands of men who had not the slightest notion of what they were doing. Luckily, in Bobby Mal found a man with a genius for organizing and distributing the work to be done; and Sorrel, once he came out of his black mood— which he did with amazing speed now that there was prospect of action of some sort—came up with a surprising number of very practical suggestions, which had never crossed Mal’s mind at all.

  For example, while Mal had foreseen the necessity of a separate power source for the rig, it was Sorrel who pointed out that with the warehouse cut off from community power, the lights inside it would be off, and the heavy outer door would have to be worked by hand. And it was Sorrel who took the necessary steps to set up emergency power to take care of these things. Also it was Sorrel who foresaw the need for a vision screen rigged outside the warehouse walls, so that they would not find themselves flying blind once they got up and away from the plateau.

  It was Mal, however, who discovered the problem of making the warehouse hover in mid-air. It was all very well to suddenly appear a thousand feet above the plateau; but what was to support them after they appeared? The answer, luckily, was found to be a simple matter of setting the controls so that the warehouse would be continually returned to the spot at which it was to appear, whenever it began to fall from it.

  Dirk was amazed and somewhat concerned over the smallness of the power source Mal claimed he required for the rig. They had from the stock in the warehouse an almost unlimited supply of individual power packs. But Mal had only taken five.

  “You don’t understand,” said Mal, raising his voice a little over the soft buzzing noise of several dozen men boring holes in the concrete walls for synchronizer lead-in rods. “The distance we have to move has nothing to do with it. All I need is power enough to control and match the resonances of all particles in our area.”

  “Well—I suppose so,” answered Dirk dubiously. “But don’t you think it’d be a good idea to have some extra ones in case of emergency?”

  “What emergency?”

  “Oh, something might come up,” said Dirk vaguely but stubbornly. And, in the end, because Mal saw others mirroring Dirk’s attitude, he added another half-dozen, quite unnecessary power packs. He could not really blame them for their attitude. When a man has been brought up to believe that one individual power pack lifts five hundred pounds and no more, it is a little hard for him to accept the notion of five such power packs lifting a couple of hundred thousand tons of warehouse, supplies and people.

  The resonance unit, Mal himself put together; and, when the rods were in place, he attached their lead-ins to his main cable. Then for a minute they all stood around and looked at each other: a little knot of tense people in the very middle of an enormous warehouse, with something that looked like a boy’s homemade vision set on the floor at their feet and cable leads snaking away toward dusty, obscure corners of the building.

  “All right,” said Mal, “here goes—”

  And he threw his switch.

  Everybody looked from the equipment at his feet to the receiving screen of the viewing unit Sorrel had rigged, which sat on a packing case to one side of the equipment. Where a picture of the furniture in the empty warehouse office had shown only a second before, it was now still and black, with the faint exception of a tiny glow at the bottom edge of the black square. Sorrel played with the controls. The angle of vision tilted and the plateau stood out sharp and clear in its own illumination far below them.

  “There it is,” said Sorrel.

  For a moment the bunch of people hung in silence, watching the screen, uneasily aware of the unfamiliar magic that held them suspended in nothingness. Then Mal forced himself to break the silence.

  “Now,” he said to Bobby, “which way?”

  “Straight north,” creaked the fat man. “About twenty-three hundred kilometers.”

  The direction was simple and the calculations also, since the new direction was still relative to the base position of the plateau. Still, it required a few minutes with the calculators clicking before Mal closed the switch on the rig again.

  “There!” said Sorrel, peering at the screen. “About half a mile to the right and straight down. You going to land this thing?”

  Mal hesitated.

  “I think I’d better not,” he said. “Even if we knew the exact distance to the ground—”

  “Which we don’t and it isn’t worth rigging an altimeter for,” said Bobby. “We can go down by belt. You okay to wait here, Mal?”

  “I’ll wait,” said Mal.

  And so it was settled.


  The Underground went down by power belts into the night jungle—all of them; and, in the interval, which stretched out into a couple of hours, Mal and Dirk and Margie sat under the emergency rigged lights around the sling that still held the motionless Peep, just sitting and not saying much to each other.

  After two hours there was the sound of feet landing on the sill of the warehouse entrance from which the big door had been slid back, thanks to Sorrel’s auxiliary power units; and Sorrel and Bobby came into the bright circle of light around Peep’s sling.

  Mal looked at them.

  “Where’s the navigator?” he asked.

  “None of them’d come,” answered Sorrel. “Nobody wants to go. I’d go, or Bobby here’d risk it, but we’re not navigators. And they’re going to need the two of us back on Earth. Vanderloon’s moving to take over already. We’ll be fighting Company Police in the street before this’s over.”

  “Then how are we going to get to Arcturus?” demanded Dirk. “We can’t—”

  “Bobby—” said Sorrel. And Bobby reached into his baggy pants and produced a sheaf of papers covered with calculations.

  “The boys figured it out for you,” the fat man said. “Here’s all you got to know for the period of the next twelve hours. It ain’t much, but it’s enough, if you know how to use it.”

  Mal took the papers silently.

  “Sorry, hopper,” said Sorrel uncomfortably. “You can’t blame them.”

  “No,” answered Mal slowly. “No, I suppose not.”

  “Well, so long, then. Good luck!”

  The two Underground men shook hands all around, Bobby with his white, moonface completely expressionless. Then they turned and walked away and off the lip of the warehouse entrance, framed for a second against the thin paleness in the distant sky that was the approaching dawn, before they dropped from sight. Mal walked over and pressed the button that closed the door behind them.

  He came back to the other two where they stood by the sling and they regarded each other soberly. Three little people, a building never intended to be moved five inches from the place where it had been built, and a haywire rig that was more theory than practice—and one hundred and twenty long, achingly empty light-years to Arcturus.

  Mal thumbed the switch that sealed the building’s ventilators. With this act they were now sealed off in their own small, concrete world. Slowly he returned to the rig and sat down beside it. He spread the sheets of paper out before him and began to run his figures on the calculator they had unearthed from the pile of crated ones in the warehouse stacks. For a while there was no sound other than the busy clicking of its keys under his fingers. Then he stopped and shut the machine off.

  “Finished?” said Dirk; and he looked up to find the eyes of both Dirk and Margie upon him.

  He nodded, stretching the kinks out of his back.

  “It’s only approximate,” he said. “I don’t dare go too close on the first jump. We don’t know where the planets of the system are—if any. And we don’t want to land on the sun itself.” And he smiled at them, a little tired.

  Margie smiled back, a smile that warmed him, even through his fatigue.

  “What are we waiting for, then?” asked Dirk.

  Mal glanced at the chronometer attached to the rig-

  “Just a few seconds more,” he said. “It’ll trip automatically when the departure moment hits. We’re almost on it—hold on now—now!”

  There was the slight tick of a closing circuit from the rig. As on the two previous occasions, there was no sensation to mark the fact of their transportation. Only the dim jungle scene in the screen was abruptly replaced by a field of stars.

  For a moment they stood in silence, awe-struck by the immensity of their achievement. Then Dirk found his voice.

  “But where—” he said, “where’s Arcturus?”

  Mal stared.

  “We must have our backs to it,” he said and he bent to the televisor controls.

  For a moment the field of stars remained the same. Then they swam grandly off to the left of the screen and a blazing sun marched in on the right.

  “Oh—Mal!” breathed Margie.

  “Big, isn’t it?” said Mal, dizzy.

  They stood staring at Arcturus, floating in all his golden glory in the black ocean of his surrounding space. Then Mal had turned the warehouse past the blinding vision ; and they were all blinking their eyes and trying to readjust to the normal picture of star-filled space.

  “See anything with a noticeable disk that might be a planet?” Mal asked the others. They shook their heads. Mal turned the warehouse to a fresh section of the space around them; and they were just about to continue their search when the interruption came.

  Behind them all, without warning, the wide warehouse door suddenly whipped back into its recess; and a tall figure stood framed in the opening, with the stars for a backdrop. Turning, they stared at him, too shocked by the unexpectedness of his appearance to wonder at the relatively minor miracle that was keeping their air from exploding all at once, out through the wide opening, sucking them with it into the vacuum of space.

  The stranger was humanoid in appearance; and ever afterward they referred to him as The Golden Man, although none of them was ever able to remember later whether the glittering color encasing him was of his own natural skin or clothing of some sort. He stood a little taller than Mal, but not so tall as Dirk; and he walked as if his joints were oiled.

  He walked toward them now and spoke to them in their own language.

  “So you’ve finally made the jump,” he said.

  Mal nodded. There was nothing he could think of in that moment to say. Instead, he turned and indicated the sling behind them where Peep lay still.

  “If you don’t mind,” he said, “we’ve got a friend here who needs looking after—”

  The Golden Man looked and put his hand on Mal’s shoulder reassuringly.

  “We’ll take care of him,” he said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE ALIENS ON Arcturus Planet had been kind. They had been very kind. But they had also been firm. The plain truth of the matter was that it was not physically safe for the three humans to go wandering around the planet, or indeed to go outside a very narrow, circumscribed area. They had, in fact, been out once or twice with a guide to look after them; but the things they saw proved for the most part to be incomprehensible. There was a tall pillar, for example, in the center of what appeared to be a broad street, that flickered through a ceaseless succession of colors; and when they asked their guide about it the best he could do by way of explanation was to describe it as an orientation device. He was a fat, stubby little man, their guide—very human looking; and they all suspected him of being a robot made up specially to put them at their ease, but none of them had the nerve to ask him outright if this was so.

  “What kind of orientation?” asked Mal.

  “Physical,” answered the guide.

  Mal considered this. Like so many things connected with this world and the Federation, it always seemed just on the verge of making sense, without quite succeeding.

  “For example?” he said, plowing ahead stubbornly.

  “Well—for one type of example,” said the guide, “haven’t you ever wondered precisely in what direction and how far away some particular place might be from where you stand at this moment? A sudden nostalgic feeling takes you, say, for the place you call home on your native Earth. This—” he waved at the flickering pillar—“would answer your questions and strengthem the image in your mind, if you were educated to the use of it.”

  “Oh?” said Mal. He looked at the pillar. “Is it that important—I mean, is it necessary to some of these people to have something like that?” And he nodded to the various shapes and sizes of beings of differing races moving about them on the street.

  “Oh, not necessary, of course,” said the guide with a smile. “But rather nice to have, don’t you think?”

  Mal g
ave up.

  There was also an empty space in a rather crowded street that the throngs of hurrying Aliens all carefully skirted for no obvious reason. As far as the three humans could see, it was just a bare stretch of thoroughfare, no different from the rest of which it was a part.

  “Is that dangerous for some reason?” asked Dirk, stopping to look at it.

  “Oh, no,” said the guide.

  “Then, why does everybody walk around it?” asked Margie.

  The guide thought. “I don’t believe I can explain this to you in any meaningful terms,” he said at last.

  “Try,” said Mal, scowling. It irritated him beyond measure to be told anything was unexplainable to him.

  “You’d need a thorough grounding in emotional science—”

  “What?” demanded Mal.

  “The science of emotion—you see?” said the guide. “The very term sounds like nonsense to you.”

  “Go ahead anyhow,” said Mal doggedly.

  “Very well,” said the little man. “Perhaps the most simple way of putting it would be to say that the avoidance of that area is a voluntary expression of mutual good will and affection. It’s symbolic. Perhaps a few minutes before we came along that area was just another part of the pavement, walked over like all the rest of it. Then some passer-by went a little out of his way to let another pass him. Another passer-by a short distance behind him saw and repeated the small detour as a gesture of courtesy and affection when he came to the same spot. And the gesture is still being taken up by those who come by, a litttle intangible tribute to kindness. It may last only a few more minutes, it may last an hour or two, if everyone coming along repeats it. Eventually it will disappear. Such repetitions—and I warned you in the beginning this would not make sense to you—are part of our empathic culture.”

  “Empathic culture?” asked Mal.

  “Why don’t you just give up?” put in Dirk.

  “I want to know,” said Mal.

  “The whole field of emotions,” said the guide, “is something that your civilization has not yet begun to deal with on a conscious scientific basis. It is a baffling field in which there is no exactness and every element is a variable. I cannot possibly explain it to you.”