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  Galaxy Magazine

  Part One

  December 1961-February 1962

  Vol. 20, Nos. 2-3

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  Jerry eBooks

  May 2020

  For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

  —Ecclesiastes, ix, 12

  “EARTH is dead. They murdered our Earth!” Carl Donnan didn’t answer at once. He remained standing by the viewport, his back to the others. Dimly he was aware of Goldspring’s voice as it rose toward a scream, broke off and turned into the hoarse belly-deep sobs of a man not used to tears. He heard Goldspring stumble across the deck before he said, flat and empty:

  “Who are ‘they’ ?”

  But the footfalls had already gone out the door.

  No one else made a sound. The ship hummed and whispered, air renewers, ventilators, thermostats, electric generators, weight maintainers, the instruments that were her senses and the nuclear converter that was her heart. But the noise was no louder in Donnan’s ears than-his own pulse. Nor any more meaningful, now.

  The universe is mostly silence. There was noise aplenty on Earth, he thought. Rumble and bellow as the crust shook, as mountains broke open and newborn volcanoes spat fire at the sky. Seethe and hiss as the oceans cooled back down from boiling. Shriek and skirl as winds went scouring across black stone continents which had lately run molten as ash and smoke and acid rain flew beneath sulfurous clouds. Crack and boom as lightning split heaven and turned the night briefly vivid, so that every upthrust crag was etched against the horizon. But there was no one to hear.

  He turned back to the others.

  BOWMAN, the executive officer, had laid himself on the deck, drawn up his knees and covered his face. Kunz the astronomer and Easterling the planetographer were still hunched over their instruments, as if they would find some misfunction that would give the lie to what they could see with unaided eyes. Captain Strathey had not yet looked away from the ruin of Earth. He stood with more-than-Annapolis straightness and the long handsome countenance was as drained of expression as it was of color.

  “Captain,” Donnan made himself say. “Captain, sir—” He waited. The silence returned. Strathey had not moved.

  “Judas in hell!” Donnan exploded. “Your eyeballs gone into orbit around that thing out there?” He made three strides across the bridge, clapped a hand on Strathey’s shoulder and spun him around. “Cut that out!”

  Strathey’s gaze drifted back toward the viewscreen. Donnan slapped him, a pistol noise at which Kunz started and began to weep.

  “Look here,” Donnan said between his teeth. “Men in the observatory satellites, in the Moon bases, in clear space, wouldn’t’a been touched. We’ve got to raise them. Find out what happened and—begin again, God damn us!” His tone wobbled. He swore at himself for it. “Bowman! Get on the radio!”

  Strathey stirred. His lips went rigid, and he said in almost his old manner, “I am still the master of this ship, Mr. Donnan.”

  “Good. I thought that’d fetch you.” Donnan let him go and fumbled after pipe and tobacco. His hands began to shake so badly that he couldn’t get the stuff out of his pockets.

  “I—” Strathey squeezed his eyes shut and knuckled his forehead. “A radio signal might attract . . . whoever is responsible.” The tall blue-jacketed body straightened again. “We may have to risk it later. But for the present we’ll maintain strict radio silence. Mr. Kunz, kindly make a telescopic search for Earth satellites and have a look at the Moon. Mr. Bowman—Bowman! Prepare to move ship. Until we know better what’s afoot, I don’t want to stay in an obvious orbit.” He blinked with sudden awareness. “You, Mr. Donnan. You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I was close by, fetching some stuff,” the engineer explained. “I overheard you as you checked the data.” He paused. “I’m afraid everybody knows by now. Best order the men to emergency stations . . . if I may make a suggestion, that is. And if you’ll authorize me to take whatever measures may be needed to restore order, I’ll see to that for you.”

  Strathey stared at him for a while. “Very good,” he said, with a jerky sort of nod. “Carry on.”

  DONNAN left the bridge. Something to do, he thought, someone to browbeat, anything so as to get over these shakes. Relax, son, he told himself. The game’s not necessarily over.

  Is it worth playing further, though?

  By God, yes! As long as one man is alive and prepared to kick back, it is! He hurried down the passageway with the slightly rolling gait that remained to him of his years at sea: a stocky, square-shouldered man of medium height in his mid-thirties, sandy-haired, gray-eyed, his face broad and blunt and weathered. He wore the blue zipsuit chosen for comfort as well as practicality by most of the Franklin’s crew, but a battered old R.A.F. beret slanted athwart his brow.

  Other men appeared here and there in the corridor, and now he could hear the buzz of them, like an upset beehive, up and down the ship’s length—three hundred men, three years gone, who had come back to find the Earth murdered.

  Not just their own homes, or their cities, or the United States of America. Earth. Donnan checked himself from dwelling on the distinction. Too much else to do. He entered his cabin, loaded his gun and holstered it. The worn butt fitted his palm comfortably; he had found use for this Mauser in a lot of places. But today it was only a badge, of course. He could not shoot perhaps one three-hundredth of the human species, not even if it needed shooting.

  He opened a drawer, regarded the contents thoughtfully and took out a little cylinder of iron. Clasped in his fist, it would add enough power to a blow, without adding too much. He dropped it in a pocket. In his days on the bum, when he worked for this or that cheap restaurant and expected trouble, it had been a roll of nickles.

  He went out again.

  A man came past, one of the civilian scientists. He screamed as he walked. Donnan stepped in front of him. “Where you going, Wright?” he asked mildly. “Didn’t you hear the hooter?”

  “Earth,” Wright cried from jaws stretched open. “The Earth’s been destroyed. I saw. In a viewscreen. All black and smoking. Dead as the Moon!”

  “Which does not change the fact your emergency station is back that-a-way. Come on, now, march. We can talk this over later on.”

  “You don’t understand! I had a wife and three children there. I’ve got to know! Let me by, you bastard!”

  DONNAN put him on the deck with a standard devil’s handshake, helped him up, and dusted him off. “Be some use to what’s left of the human race, Wright. It was your family’s race too.” The scientist moved away, quaking but headed in the proper direction.

  A younger man had stopped to watch. He spat on the deck. “What human race?” he said. “Three hundred males?”

  The siren cut loose again, insanely.

  “Maybe not,” Donnan answered. “We don’t know yet. There were women in space as well as men. Get on with your job, son.”

  He made his way aft, arguing, cajoling, once or twice striking. Strathey told him over the intercom that the other decks were under control. Not that there had been much trouble. Most personnel had gone to their posts as directed . . . the way Donnan had seen cattle go down a stockyard chute. A working minority still put some snap into their movements.

  He might have been astonished, in some cases, at what people
fitted which category—big Yule, for instance, who had saved three men’s lives when the storm broke loose on Ubal, or whatever the heathenish name of that planet had been, now uselessly wailing, and mild little Murdoch the linguist manning Yule’s torpedo tube—but Donnan had knocked around too much in his day to be surprised at anything people did.

  When he felt the quiver and heard the low roar as the U.S.S. Benjamin Franklin got under way, he hesitated. His own official post was with his instruments, at the No. 4 locker. But—

  There was little sense of motion. The paragravitic drive maintained identical pseudo-weight inboard, whether the ship was in free fall or under ten gravities’ acceleration . . . or riding the standing waves of space at super-light quasi-speed, for that matter. Everything seemed in order. Too much so, even. Donnan preferred more flexibility in a crew. With sudden decision, he turned on his heel and went down the nearest companionway.

  Ramri of Monwaing’s Katkinu rated a suite in officer country, though much of this was devoted to storage of the special foods which he required and which he preferred to cook for himself. Donnan tried the door. It opened. He stepped through, closed and latched it behind him and said, “You bloody fool.”

  THE being who sat in a spidery aluminum framework rose with habitual gracefulness. Puzzlement blurred, for a moment, the distress in the great golden eyes.

  “What is the complaint, Carl-my-friend?” he trilled. His accent was indescribable, but made English a sound of beauty.

  “Blind luck some hysterical type didn’t decide your people attacked Earth, bust in and shoot you,” Donnan told him.

  The man felt collected enough now to stuff and light a pipe. Through the smoke veil, he considered the Monwaingi. Yeah, he thought, they’re for sure prettier than humans, but you have to see them to realize it. In words, they seem like cartoon figures. About five feet tall, the short avian body was balanced on two stout yellow legs. (The clawed toes could deal a murderous kick, Donnan had observed. The Monwaingi were perhaps more civilized than man, but there was nothing Aunt Nelly about them.) The arms, thinner and weaker than human, ended in hands whose three fingers, four-jointed and mutually opposed, were surprisingly dextrous. The head, atop a long thick neck, was large and round, with a hooked beak. A throat pouch produced a whole orchestra of sounds, even labials.

  There was a serene grace in Ramri’s form and stance; the Greeks would have liked to sculpture him. (Athens went down into a pit of fire.) But all you could really convey in words was the intense blueness of the feathers, the white plumage of tail and crest. Ramri didn’t wear anything but a pouch hung from the neck, nor did he need clothes.

  He plucked at the thong the pouch hung from, miserable, looked toward Donnan and away. “I heard somewhat,” he began. His tone died out in a sigh like violins. “I am so grieved.” He leaned an arm on the bulkhead and his forehead on the arm, as a man might. “What can I say? I cannot even comprehend it.” Donnan started to pace, back and forth, back and forth. “You have no idea, then, what might have happened?”

  “No. Certainly not. I swear—”

  “Never mind, I believe you. What usually causes this sort of thing?”

  Ramri pulled his face around to give Donnan a blank look. “Causes it? I do not snatch your meaning.”

  “How do other planets get destroyed?” Donnan barked.

  “They don’t.”

  “Huh?” Donnan stopped short. “You mean . . . no. In all the war and politicking and general hooraw throughout the galaxy—it’s got to happen sometimes.”

  “No. Never to my knowledge. Perhaps occasionally. Who can know everything that occurs? But never in our purview of history.

  Did you imagine—Carl-my-friend, did you imagine my Society, any Society of Monwaing, would have introduced a planet to such a hazard? A . . . sumdau thanugaw—a world?” Ramri cried. “An intelligent species? An entire destiny?”

  He staggered back to his framework and collapsed. A low keening began in his throat and rose, while he rocked in the seat, until the cabin rang. Even through the alien tone scale, Donnan sensed such mourning that his flesh crawled. “Stop that!” he said, but Ramri didn’t seem to hear.

  Was this the Monwaingi form of tears? He didn’t know. There was so bloody much the human race didn’t know.

  And never would, probably.

  DONNAN beat one fist against the bulkhead.

  It was coming home to him too, forcing its way past every barrier he could erect, the full understanding of what had been done. Maybe so far he’d been saved from shivering into pieces by the habit of years, tight situations, violence and death from New Mexico to New Guinea, Morocco to the Moon—and beyond. But habit was now crumpling in him too and presently he’d ram the pistol barrel up to his mouth.

  Or maybe, a remote part of him thought, he’d had less to lose than men like Goldspring and Wright. No wife waiting in a house they’d once painted together, no small tangletops asking for a story, not even a dog any more.

  There’d been girls here and there, of course. And Alison. But she’d quit and gone to Reno, and looking back long afterward he’d understood the blame was mostly his fiddle-footed own . . . and returning from three years among strange suns he had daydreamed of finding someone else and making a really honest try with her. But as the barriers came down, he saw there would be no second chance, not ever again, and he started to break as other men on the ship had broken.

  Until suddenly he realized he was feeling sorry for himself.

  His father had taught him that was the lowest emotion a man could have. If nothing else, the impoverished rancher had given this to his son. (No, much more. Horses and keen sunlight, sagebrush and blue distances and a Navajo cowboy who showed him how to stalk antelope—but all those things were vapors, adrift above growling emptiness.) The pipestem broke between Donnan’s teeth. He knocked the bowl out most carefully and said:

  “Someone did the job, I reckon. Not too long ago, either. Assuming only the superficial rocks were melted and the oceans didn’t boil clear down to the bottom, it shouldn’t take more than several months to cool as far as our bolometers indicate. Eh? So what’s been going on in this neck of the galaxy while we were away? Guess, Ramri. You’d be more at home with interstellar politics than any human. Could the Kandemir-Vorlak war have reached this far?”

  The Monwaingi cut off his dirge as if with a knife. “I do not know,” he said in a thin voice, like a hurt child. (Oh, God-who-doesn’t-give-a-hoot, the children never knew, did they? The end came too fast for them to feel, didn’t it?) “I do not believe so. And in any event . . . would even Kandemir have been so . . . pagaung . . . and why? What could anyone gain? Planets have sometimes been bombarded into submission, but never—” He sprang to his feet. “We did not know, we of Monwaing!” he stammered. “When we discovered Earth, twenty years ago—when we began trading and you began learning and—and—and—we never dreamed this could happen!”

  “Sure,” said Donnan softly.

  HE WENT over and took the avian in his arms. The beaked, crested head rested on the man’s breast and the body shuddered. Donnan felt the panic of total horror recede in himself. Someone aboard this boltbucket has to keep off his beam ends for a while yet, he thought. I reckon I can. Try, anyway.

  “Hell, Ramri,” he murmured, “men have lived with more or less this possibility since they touched off their first atomic bomb, and that was—when? Forty-five, fifty years ago? Something like that. Since before I was born. So finally it’s happened. But thanks to you, we had spaceships when it did. A few. There must be a few other Earth ships knocking around in the galaxy. Russian, Chinese. . . they say at least one of those was coeducational. The Europeans were building two when the Franklin left. There was talk of crewing one with women. Damnation, chum, maybe we’d all be finished, in one of our home-grown wars, if your people hadn’t showed up. Maybe you’ve given us a chance yet. Anyhow, you Monwaingi weren’t the only ones in space. Somebody from Kandemir on Vorlak or some
other planet would have dropped in on Sol within a few years if you hadn’t. Galactic civilization was spreading into this spiral arm, that’s all. Now come on, wipe your eyes or blow your nose or twiddle your fingers or whatever your people do. We’ve got work ahead of us.”

  Ramri was born alive, but had been nursed on food regurgitated by his parents; he breathed oxygen, but the proteins of his body were dextrorotatory where Donnan’s were levorotatory; he could live in a terrestroid ecology, but only after he had been immunized against a dozen different allergens; he came from a technologically advanced planet, but the concepts of his civilization could hardly be put into human terms.

  And yet, Donnan thought, we aren’t so different in what matters.

  Or are we?

  He didn’t let himself stiffen, outwardly, but he stood for a while weighing the possibility in a mind turned cold. And then the siren blew again, and Strathey’s voice filled the ship:

  “Battle stations! Prepare for combat! Three unidentified objects approaching, six o’clock low. They seem to be nuclear missiles. Stand by for evasive action and combat!”

  II

  It is the business of the future to be dangerous.

  —Whitehead

  NAMRI was out the door before the announcement repeated.

  Though human space pilots were competent enough, there were as yet none who had grown up with ships, like him and his fathers through the past century and a half. The thousand subtleties of tradition were lacking. In an emergency, Ramri took the control board.

  This was an emergency. There was no doubt of that—whatever had happened below.

  Donnan stared after him, wrestled temptation and lost. He, a plain and civilian mechanical engineer, had no right to be on the bridge. But what he’d lately seen there made him doubt if anyone else did either. Not that he figured himself for a savior; he just wanted to be dealt in. With a shrug, he started after the Monwaingi.