The High Ones and Other Stories Read online

  THE HIGH ONES AND OTHER STORIES by POUL ANDERSON

  * * * *

  Published by

  Wonder Publishing Group Books,

  a division of Wonder Audiobooks LLC

  Northville, MI 48167

  Compilation ©2010 Wonder Publishing Group,

  a division of Wonder Audiobooks LLC

  All rights reserved

  The stories were first published in the following magazines:

  The High Ones — Infinity Science Fiction, June 1958

  Out of the Iron Womb — Planet Stories, Summer 1955

  Turning Point — If, May 1963

  The Apprentice Wobbler — Star Science Fiction, January 1958

  Star Ship — Planet Stories, Fall 1950

  Corkscrew of Space — Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1956

  Lord of a Thousand Suns — Planet Stories, September 1951

  The Soldier From the Stars — Fantastic Universe, June 1955

  Swordman of Lost Terra — Planet Stories, November 1951

  The Chapter Ends — Dynamic Science Fiction, January 1954

  * * * *

  Table of Contents

  THE HIGH ONES

  OUT OF THE IRON WOMB!

  TURNING POINT

  THE APPRENTICE WOBBLER

  STAR SHIP

  THE CORKSCREW OF SPACE

  LORD OF A THOUSAND SUNS

  THE SOLDIER FROM THE STARS

  SWORDSMAN OF LOST TERRA

  THE CHAPTER ENDS

  THE HIGH ONES

  CHAPTER I

  When he first saw the planet, green and blue and cloudy white across many cold stars, Eben Holbrook had a sense of coming home. He turned from the viewport so that Ekaterina Ivanovna should not see the quick tears in his eyes. Thereafter it became a long waiting, but his hope upbore him and he stayed free of the quarrels which now flared in the ship. Nerves were worn thin, three parsecs and fifty-eight years from Earth; only those who found a way to occupy their hands could endure this final unsureness. Because it might not be final. Tau Ceti might have no world on which men could walk freely. And then it would be back into the night of suspended animation and the night of unending space, for no man knew how long.

  Holbrook was not a scientist, to examine how safe the planet was for rhesus monkeys and human volunteers. He was a nucleonics engineer. Since his chief, Rakitin, had been killed in the mutiny, he was in charge of the thermonuclear ion-drive. Now that the Rurik swung in orbit, he found his time empty, and he was too valuable for Captain Svenstrup to accept him as a guinea pig down on the surface. But he had an idea for improving the engines of the great spaceship's auxiliary boats, and he wrapped himself in a fog of mathematics and made tests and swore and returned to his computations, for all the weeks it took. In spare moments he amused himself with biological textbooks, an old hobby of his.

  That was one way to stay out of trouble, and to forget the scorn in certain hazel eyes.

  The report came at last: as nearly as could be told, this world was suitable for humans. Safer than Earth, in that so far no diseases had seemed able to attack the newcomers; yet with so similar a biochemistry that many local meats and plants were edible and the seeds and frozen livestock embryos on the ship could surely thrive. Of course, it was always possible that long-range effects existed, or that in some other region—

  "To hell with it," said Captain Svenstrup. "We're going down."

  After such a word, he would have faced a mutiny himself had he decreed otherwise.

  * * * *

  They left the Rurik in orbit and the boats gleamed through a high blue heaven—with just the faintest tinge of purple, in this slightly redder sunlight—to land on grass twin-bladed but soft and green, near trees which swayed almost like poplars above a hurried chill river. Not far away lifted steep, darkly forested hills, and beyond them a few snow-peaks haunted the sky. That night fires blazed among temporary shelters, folk danced and sang, accordions mingled with banjos, the vodka bottle worked harder than the samovar, and quite likely a few new human lives were begun.

  There were two moons, one so close that it hurtled between constellations not very different from those of home (what was ten light-years in this god-sized cosmos?) and one stately in a clear crystal dark. The planet's period of rotation was 31 hours, its axial tilt 11°; seasons here would not be extreme. They named it New Earth in their various languages, but the Russian majority soon had everyone else calling it Novaya Zemlya, and that quickly became a simple Novaya. Meanwhile they got busy.

  There had been no sign of aborigines to dispute Paradise, but one could never be certain, nor learn too much. Man had had a long time to familiarize himself with Old Earth; the colonists must gain equivalent information in months. So small aircraft were brought down and assembled, and ranged widely.

  Holbrook was taking a scout turn, with Ilya Feodorovitch Grushenko and Solomon Levine, when they found the aliens.

  It was several hundred kilometers from the settlement, on the other side of the mountains. Suddenly the jet flashed over a wooded ridge, and there was the mine pit, and the machines, and the spaceships.

  "Judas priest!" gasped Holbrook. He crammed back the stick. The jet spurted forward.

  Grushenko picked up the mike and rattled a report. Only a tape recorder heard it: they had too much work to do in camp. He slammed the mike back down and looked grimly at the Americans. "We had best investigate on foot, comrades," he said.

  "Hadn't we better … get back … maybe they didn't see us go over," stammered Holbrook.

  Grushenko barked a laugh. "How long do you expect them not to know about us? Let us learn what we can while we can."

  He was a heavy-muscled man, affecting the shaven pate of an Army officer; he made no bones about being an unreconstructed sovietist, he had killed two mutineers before they overpowered him and since then his cooperation was surly. But now Levine nodded a bespectacled head and put in: "He's right, Eben. We can take a walky-talky, and the jet's transmitter will relay back to camp." He lifted a rifle from its rack and sighed. "I had hoped never to carry one of these again."

  "It may not be necessary," said Holbrook in a desperate voice. "Those creatures … they don't live here … they can't! Why couldn't we make an … agreement—"

  "Perhaps." A faraway light flickered in Grushenko's pale eyes. "Yes, once we learn their language … it might very well be possible, mutual interest and— After all, their level of technology implies they have reached the soviet stage of development."

  "Oh, come off it," said Levine in English.

  Holbrook used a downblast to land the jet in a meadow, a few kilometers from the alien diggings. If the craft had not been noticed—and it had gone over very quickly—its crew should be able to steal up and observe … He was glad of the imposed silence as they slipped among great shadowy trees; what could he have said, even to Levine? That was how it always went, he thought in a curious irrelevant anguish. He was not much more nervous than the next man, but he had no words at the high moments. His tongue knotted up and he stood like a wooden Indian under the gaze of Ekaterina Ivanovna.

  At the end of their walk, they stood peering down a slope through a screen of brush. The land was raw and devastated, it must have been worked for centuries. Holbrook remembered a survey report: curious formations spotted all over the planet, pits hundreds of meters deep. Yes, they must be the grass-grown remnants of similar mines, exhausted and abandoned. How long had the aliens been coming here? The automatons which purred about, digging and carrying, grinding, purifying, loading into the incredibly big and sleek blue spaceships, were such as no one on Earth had ever built.

  Levine's voice muttered to a recorder be
yond the mountains, "Looks like rare-earth ores to me. That suggests they've been civilized long enough to use up their home planet's supply, which is one hell of a long time, my friends." Holbrook thought in a frozenness that it would be very hard to describe the engines down there; they were too foreign, the eye saw them but the mind wasn't yet prepared to register—

  "They heard us! They are coming!"

  Grushenko said it almost exultantly. Holbrook and Levine whirled about. Half a dozen forms were moving at a trot up the slope, directly toward the humans. Holbrook had a lurching impression of creatures dressed in black, with purplish faces muffled by some kind of respirator snout, two legs, two arms, but much too long and thin. He remembered the goblins of his childhood, in a lost Maine forest, and a primitive terror took him.

  He fought it down just as Grushenko stepped out of concealment. "Friends!" cried Grushenko. He raised both hands. "Friends!" The sun gleamed on his bare head.

  An alien raised a tube. Something like a fist struck Holbrook. He went to his knees. A small hot crater smoked not two meters from him. Grushenko staggered back, shooting. One of the aliens went on its unhuman face. They deployed, still running to the attack. Another explosion outraged the earth; fire crawled up a tree trunk. And another. "Let's go!" yelled Holbrook.

  He saw Levine fall. The little man stared surprised at the cooked remnant of a leg. Holbrook made a grab for him. A gray face turned up. "No," said Levine. He cradled his rifle and thumbed it, to full automatic. "No heroics, please. Get the hell back to camp. I'll hold 'em."

  He began to shoot. Grushenko snatched at Holbrook's wrist. Both men pounded down the farther hillside. The snarl of the Terrestrial rifle and the boom of the alien blast-guns followed them. Through the racket, for a second as he ran, Holbrook heard Levine's voice into the walky-talky mike: "Four of 'em left. A few more coming out of the spaceships. I see three in green clothes. The weapons seem … oh, Sarah, help me, the pain … packaged energy … a super-dielectric maybe."

  CHAPTER II

  The officers of the Rurik sat at a long rough table, under trees whose rustling was not quite like that of any trees on Earth. They looked toward Holbrook and Grushenko, and they listened.

  "So we got the jet aloft," finished Holbrook. "We, uh, took a long route home—didn't see any, uh, pursuit—" He swore at himself and sat down. "That's all, I guess."

  Captain Svenstrup stroked his red beard and said heavily: "Well, ladies and gentlemen. The problem is whether we hide out for a while in hopes of some lucky chance, or evacuate this system at once."

  "You forget that we might fight!"

  Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov said it in a voice that rang. The blood leaped up in her wide, high-boned face; under her battered cap, Tau Ceti tinged the short wheaten hair with copper.

  "Fight?" Svenstrup skinned his teeth. "A hundred humans, one spaceship, against a whole planet?"

  The young woman rose to her feet. Even through the baggy green tunic and breeches of her uniform—she had clung to it after the mutiny, Red Star and all—she was big and supple. Holbrook's heart stumbled, rose again, and hurried through a dark emptiness. She clapped a hand to her pistol and said: "But they do not belong on this planet. They must be strangers too, as far from home as we. Shall we run just because their technology is a little ahead of ours? My nation never felt that was an excuse to surrender her own soil!"

  "No," mumbled Domingo Ximénez. "Instead you went on to plunder the soil of everyone else."

  "Quiet, there!" roared Svenstrup.

  His eyes flickered back and forth, down the table and across the camp. Just inside the forest, a log cabin stood half erected; but the Finnish couple who had been making it now crouched with the rest of the crew, among guns and silence. The captain tamped tobacco into his pipe and growled: "We are all here together, Reds and Whites alike. We cannot even return to Earth without filling the ship's reaction-mass tanks, and we need a week or more just to refine enough water. Meanwhile, non-humans are operating a mine and have killed one of us without any provocation we can imagine. They could fly over and drop one nuclear bomb, and that would be the end of man on Novaya. I'm astonished that they haven't so far."

  "Or haven't even been aware of us," murmured Ekaterina. "Our boats were coming and going for a pair of months or three. Did they not notice our jet trails above the mountains? Comrades, it does not make sense!"

  Ximénez said very low: "How much sense would a mind which is not human make to us?"

  He crossed himself.

  The gesture jarred Holbrook. Had the government of the United World S.S.R. been that careless? Crypto-libertarians had gotten aboard the Rurik, yes, but a crypto-believer in God?

  Grushenko saw the movement too. His mouth lifted sardonically. "I would expect you to substitute word magic for thought," he declared. To Svenstrup: "Captain, somehow, we have alarmed the aliens—possibly we happen to resemble another species with which they are at war—but their reasoning processes must be fundamentally akin to ours, simply because the laws of nature are the same throughout the universe. Including those laws of behavior first seen by Karl Marx."

  "Pseudo-laws for a pseudo-religion!" Holbrook was surprised at himself, the way he got it out.

  Ekaterina lifted one dark brow and said, "You do not advance our cause by name calling, Lieutenant Golbrok." Dryly: "Especially when the epithets are not even original."

  He retreated into hot-faced wretchedness. But I love you, he wanted to call out. If you are Russian and I am American, if you are Red and I am White, is that a wall between us through all space and time? Can we never be simply human, my tall darling?

  "That will do," said Svenstrup. "Let's consider practicalities. Dr. Sugimoto, will you give us the reasons you gave me an hour ago, for assuming that the aliens come from Zolotoy?"

  Holbrook started. Zolotoy—the next planet out, gold-colored in the evening sky—the enemy belonged to this same system? Then there was indeed no hope but another plunge into night.

  The astronomer rose and said in singsong Russian: "It is unlikely that anyone would mine the planets of another star on so extensive a scale. It does not appear economically feasible, even if one had a spaceship which could travel nearly at light-velocity. Now long-range spectroscopy has shown Zolotoy to have a thin but essentially terrestroid atmosphere. The aliens were not wearing air suits, merely some kind of respirator—I think probably it reduces the oxygen content of their inhalations—but at any rate, they must use that gas, which is only found free on Zolotoy and Novaya in this system. The high thin bipedal shape also suggests life evolved for a lower gravity than here. If they actually heard our scouts, such sensitive ears probably developed in more tenuous air." He sat down again and drummed on the table top with jittery fingers.

  "I suppose we should have sent boats to all the other planets before landing on this one," said Svenstrup heavily. "But there was too much impatience, the crew had been locked up too long."

  "The old captain would not have tolerated such indiscipline," said Ekaterina.

  "I won't tolerate much more from you, either." Svenstrup got his pipe going. "Here is my plan. We must have more information. I am going to put the Rurik into an orbit skewed to the ecliptic plane, as safe a hiding place as any. A few volunteers will stay hidden on Novaya, refining reaction-mass water and maintaining radio contact with the ship; everyone else will wait up there. One boat will go to Zolotoy and learn what it can. Its crew will not know the Rurik's orbit; they'll report back here. Then we can decide what to do."

  He finished grayly: "If the boat returns at all, of course."

  Grushenko stood up. Something like triumph blazed in him. "As a politico-military specialist, I have been selected and trained for linguistic ability," he said. "Furthermore, I have had combat experience in suppressing the Brazilian capitalist uprising. I volunteer myself for the boat."

  "Good," said Svenstrup. "We need about two more."

  Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov smiled and said in her lo
w, oddly gentle voice, "If a Ukrainian like Comrade Grushenko goes, a Great Russian must also be represented." Her humor faded and she went on earnestly, overriding the captain, "My sex has nothing to do with it. I am a gunnery officer of the World Soviet Space Fleet. I spent two years on Mars, helping to establish a naval outpost. I feel myself qualified."

  Somehow, Holbrook was standing up. He stuttered incoherently for a moment. Their eyes speared him, a big square-faced young man with rumpled brown hair, brown eyes nearsighted behind contact lenses, his body drab in coveralls and boots. He got out finally: "Let Bunin take my post. I, I, I can find out something about their machinery—"

  "Or die with the others," said Svenstrup. "We need you here."

  Ekaterina spoke quietly. "Let him come, captain. Shall not an American also have the right to dare?"

  CHAPTER III

  The boat ran swiftly, accelerating on ion drive until Novaya was only one blue spark of beauty and Zolotoy became an aureate shield. There was much silence aboard. Watching his companions, Holbrook found time to think.

  Grushenko said at last, "There must be some point of agreement with them. It is impossible that they could be imperialists."

  Ekaterina curved her lips in a sad little grin. "Was it not impossible that disloyal elements could get onto the Rurik?"

  "There were traitors on the selection board," said Grushenko. His voice darkened. "They were to choose from many nations; man's first voyage beyond the sun was to be a symbol of the brotherhood of all men in the World Soviets. And who did they pick? Svenstrup! Ximénez! Bunin! Golbrok!"

  "Enough," said the woman. "Now we have only one cause, to survive."

  Grushenko regarded her from narrowed glacial eyes. "Sometimes I wonder about your own loyalty, Comrade Saburov. You accepted the mutiny as an accomplished fact, without even trying to agitate—you have fully cooperated with Svenstrup's regime—this will not be forgotten when we get back to Earth."