The High Ones and Other Stories Read online

  "Fifty years hence?" she gibed.

  "Fifty years is not so long when one has frozen sleep." Grushenko gave Holbrook a metallic stare. "It is true, we have a common interest at the moment. But suppose the aliens can be persuaded to aid one of our factions. Think of that, Comrade Saburov! As for you, Ami, consider your self warned. At the first sign of any such attempt on your part, I shall kill you.'

  Holbrook shrugged. "I'm not too worried by that kind of threat," he said. "You Reds are a small minority, you know. And the minority will grow still smaller every year, as people get a taste for liberty."

  "So far there has been nothing the loyal element could do," said Ekaterina. The frigidity of her tone was a pain within him; but he could not back down, even in words, when men had died in the spaceship's corridors that other men might be free. "Our time will come. Until then, do not mistake enforced cooperation for willingness. Svenstrup was clever. He spent a year organizing his conspiracy. He called the uprising at a moment when more Whites than Reds were awake on duty. We others woke up to find him in charge and all the weapons borne by his men. What could we do but help man the ship? If anything went wrong with it, no one aboard would ever see daylight again."

  Holbrook fumbled after a reply: "If the government at home is, uh, so wonderful … how did the selection board let would-be rebels like me into the crew? They must have known. They must have hoped … some day the mutineers … or their descendants … would come back … at the head of a liberating fleet!"

  "No!" she cried. Wrath reddened her pale skin. "Your filthy propaganda has had some results among the crew, yes, but to make them all active traitors—the stars will grow cold first!"

  Holbrook heard himself speaking fluently; the words sprang out like warriors. "Why not be honest with yourself?" he challenged. "Look at the facts. The expedition was to have spent a total of perhaps fifty years, at the most, getting to Alpha Centauri, surveying, planting a colony if feasible, and returning to glory. To Earth! Suddenly, because of a handful of rebels, every soul aboard found himself headed for another sun altogether. It would be almost six decades before we even got there. Not one of our friends and kin at home would be alive to welcome us back, if we tried to return. But we wouldn't. If Tau Ceti had no suitable planet, we were to go on, maybe for centuries. This generation will never see home again.

  "So why did you, why did all of them, not heed the few fanatics like Grushenko, rise up and throw themselves on our guns? Was death too high a price, even the death of the whole ship? Or if so, you still had many years in which to engineer a counter-mutiny; all of you were awake from time to time, to stand watches. Why didn't you even conspire?

  "You know very well why not! You saw women and grown men crying with joy, because they were free." Bitterness seared his tongue. "Even you noisy Red loyalists have cooperated—under protest, but you have done your assigned duties. Why? Why not set the crew an example? Why haven't you even gone on strike? Isn't it because down inside, not admitting it to yourself, you also know what a slave pen Earth has become?"

  Her hand cracked across his face. The blow rang in him. He stood gaping after her, inwardly numbed, as she flung from the control cabin into the passageway beyond.

  Grushenko nodded, not without compassion. "They may claim all the equality they will, Eben Petrovitch," he said. It was the first time he had offered that much friendship. "But they remain women. She will make a good wife for the first man who fully comprehends this is true in her own case too."

  "Which I don't?" mumbled Holbrook.

  Grushenko shook his head.

  * * * *

  And the world Zolotoy grew. They decelerated, backing down upon it. A few whirling electrons piloted them; they stared through telescopes and held up photographs to the light, hardly believing.

  "One city," whispered Ekaterina. "One city!"

  Holbrook squinted at the picture. He was not a military man and had no experience with aerial photographs. Even greatly enlarged, it bewildered him. "A city over the whole planet?" he exclaimed.

  Grushenko looked through the viewport. This close, the golden shield was darkly streaked and mottled; here and there lay a metallic gleam. "Well, perhaps twenty per cent of the total area," he replied. "But the city forms a continuous webwork, like a net spread over the entire oceanless globe. It is obviously a unit. And the open spaces are all used—mines, landing sites, transmission stations, I suppose. It is hard to tell, they are so different from any designs we understand."

  "I imagine their food is synthetic," said Ekaterina. Her snub nose wrinkled. "I should not like that. My folk have been peasants too many centuries."

  "There are no more peasants on Earth," said Grushenko stiffly. Then he shook his hairless skull and clicked his tongue in awe. "But the size of this! The power! How far ahead of us are they? A thousand years? Ten thousand? A million?"

  "Not too far ahead to murder poor old Solomon Levine," said the woman raggedly. Holbrook stole a glance at her. Sweat glittered on the wide clear brow. So she was afraid too. He felt that the fear knocking under his own ribs would be less if he could have been warding her, but she had been bleak toward him since their quarrel. Well, he thought, I'm glad she liked Solly. I guess we all did.

  "There was some mistake," said Grushenko.

  "The same mistake could kill us," said Holbrook.

  "It is possible. Are you wishing you had stayed behind?"

  The engines growled and grumbled. Fire splashed a darkness burning with suns. At 7800 kilometers out they saw one of the sputniks already identified on photographs. It was colossal, bigger than the Rurik, enigmatic with turrets and lights and skeletal towers. It swung past them in a silence like death; the sense of instruments, unliving eyes upon him, prickled in Holbrook's skin.

  Down and down. It was not really surprising when the spaceships came. They were larger than the boat, sleekly aerodynamic. Presumably the Zolotoyans did not have to bother about going into orbit and using shuttle rockets; even their biggest vessels landed directly. The lean blue shapes maneuvered with precision blasts, so close to absolute efficiency that only the dimmest glow revealed any jets at all.

  "Automatic, or remote-controlled," decided Holbrook in wonder. "Live flesh couldn't take that kind of accelerations."

  Fire blossomed in space, dazzling their eyes so they sat half blind for minutes afterward. "Magnesium flares," croaked Grushenko. "In a perfect circle around us. Precision shooting—to warn us they can put a nuclear shell in our airlock if they wish." He blinked out the viewport. Zolotoy had subtly changed position; it was no longer ahead, but below. He chuckled in a parched way. "We are not about to offer provocation, comrades."

  Muted clanks beat through the hull and their bones. Holbrook saw each whale shape as a curve in the ports, like a new horizon. "Two of them," said Ekaterina. "They have laid alongside. There is some kind of grapple." She plucked nervously at the harness of her chair. "I think they intend to carry us in."

  "We couldn't do that stunt," muttered Holbrook.

  A day came back to him. He had been a country boy, remote even from the collective farms, but once when he was seven years old he sent in a winning Party slogan (he didn't know better then) and was awarded a trip to Europe. Somehow he had entered alone that museum called Notre Dame de Paris; and when he stood in its soaring twilight he realized how helplessly small and young he was.

  He cut the engines. For a moment free fall clutched at his stomach, then a renewed pressure swiveled his chair about in the gymbals. The scout boat was being hauled around Zolotoy, but downward: they were going to some specific place on the planet for some specific purpose.

  He looked through his loneliness at Ekaterina, and found her staring at him. Angrily, she jerked her face away, reached out and grasped the hand of Ilya Grushenko.

  CHAPTER IV

  On the way, the humans decompressed their atmosphere until it approximated that of Zolotoy. There was enough oxygen to support lethargic movement, but they donned
small compression pumps, capacitor-powered, worn on the back and feeding to a nose-piece. Their starved lungs expanded gratefully. Otherwise they dressed in winter field uniforms and combat helmets. But when Ekaterina reached for her pistol, Grushenko took it from her.

  "Would you conquer them with this, Comrade Saburov?" he asked.

  She flushed. Her words came muffled through the tenuous air: "It might give us a chance to break free, if we must escape."

  "They could overhaul this boat in ten seconds. And … escape where? To interstellar space again? I say here we stop, live or die. Even from here, it will be a weary way to Earth."

  "Forget about Earth," said Holbrook out of tautness and despair. "No one is returning to Earth before Novaya is strong enough to stand off a Soviet fleet. Maybe you like to wear the Party's collar. I don't!"

  Ekaterina regarded him for a long time. Even through the dehumanizing helmet and nosepiece, he found her beautiful. She replied: "What kind of freedom is it to become the client state of an almighty Zolotoy? The Soviet overlords are at least human."

  "Watch your language, Comrade Saburov!" snapped Grushenko.

  They fell back into silence. Holbrook thought that she had pierced him again. For surely it was true, men could never be free in the shadow of gods. Even the most benign of super-creatures would breed fear and envy and hatred, by their mere incomprehensible existence; and a society riddled with such disease must soon spew up tyrants. No, better to flee while they had a chance, if they still did at all. But how much longer could they endure that devil's voyage?

  The linked vessels fell downward on micrometrically controlled blasts. When a landing was finally made, it was so smooth that for a moment Holbrook did not realize he was on Zolotoy.

  Then he unbuckled himself, went to the airlock controls and opened the boat. His eardrums popped as pressures equalized; he stepped out into a still, cold air, under a deep violet sky and a shrunken sun. The low gravity made it wholly dreamlike.

  Unthinkingly, the three humans moved close together. They looked down kilometers of glass-slick blackness. A spaceship was landing far off; machines rolled up to attend it, but otherwise there was no sign of life. Yet the emptiness did not suggest decay. Holbrook thought again of the bustle around a Terrestrial airport. It seemed grubby beside this immense quietude.

  The spacefield reached almost to the near horizon. At one end clustered several towers. They must be two kilometers high, thought Holbrook in the depths of an overwhelmed brain: half a dozen titanic leaps of metal, but blended into a harmony which caught at his heart.

  "There!"

  He turned around. The Zolotoyans were approaching.

  * * * *

  There were ten of them, riding on two small platforms: the propulsive system was not clear, and Holbrook's engineer's mind speculated about magnetic-field drives. They stood up, so rigid that not until the flying things had grounded and the creatures disembarked could the humans be quite sure they were alive.

  There was about them the same chill beauty as their city bore. Two and a half meters tall they stood, and half of it was lean narrow-footed legs. Their chests and shoulders tapered smoothly, the arms were almost cylindrical but ended in eerily manlike hands. Above slender necks poised smooth, mask-faced heads—a single slit nostril, delicately lipped mouths immobile above narrow chins, fluted ears, long amber eyes with horizontal pupils. Their skins were a dusky hairless purple. They were clad identically, in form-fitting black; they carried vaguely rifle-like tubes, the blast-guns Holbrook remembered.

  He thought between thunders: Why? Why should they ignore us for months, and then attack us so savagely when we dared to look at them, and then fail to pursue us or even search for our camp?

  What are they going to do now?

  Grushenko stepped forward. "Comrades," he said, holding up his hands. His voice came as if from far away; the bare black spaces ate it down, and Holbrook saw how a harshly suppressed fear glistened on the Ukrainian's skin. But Grushenko pointed to himself. "Man," he said. He pointed to the sky. "From the stars."

  One of the Zolotoyans trilled a few notes. But it was at the others he (?) looked. A gun prodded Holbrook's back.

  Ekaterina said with a stiff smile: "They are not in a conversational mood, Ilya Feodorovitch. Or perhaps only the commissar of interstellar relations is allowed to speak with us."

  Hands closed on Holbrook's shoulders. He was pushed along, not violently but with firmness. He mounted one of the platforms. The others followed him. They rose without sound into the air. Looking back, Holbrook saw no one, no thing, on all the fused darkness of the spaceport, except the machines unloading the other ship and a few Zolotoyans casually departing from it. And, yes, the craft which had borne down the Terrestrial boat were being trundled off, leaving the boat itself unattended.

  "Have they not even put a guard on our vessel?" choked Ekaterina.

  Grushenko shrugged. "Why should they? In a civilization this advanced there are no thieves, no vandals, no spies."

  "But … " Holbrook weighed his words. "Look, though. If an alien ship landed on your front step, wouldn't you at least be curious about it?"

  "They may have a commissar of curiosity," said Ekaterina slyly. Her humor shows up at the damnedest times! thought Holbrook.

  Grushenko gave her a hard glance. "How can you be sure, comrades, they do not already know everything about us?" he answered.

  Ekaterina shook her blonde head. "Be careful, comrade. I happen to know that speculations about telepathy are classified as bourgeois subjectivism."

  Did she actually grin as she spoke? Holbrook, unable to share her gallows mirth, lost his question, for now he was flying among the towers, and so into the city beyond.

  There was no Earth language for what he saw: soaring many-colored pride, hundreds of meters skyward, stretching farther than his eyes reached. Looped between the clean heights were elevated roadways; he saw pedestrian traffic on them, Zolotoyans in red and blue and green and white as well as black. There seemed to be association between the uniform and the physical appearance: the reds were shorter and more muscular, the greens had outsize heads—but he could not be sure, in his few bewildered glimpses. Down below were smaller buildings, domes or more esoteric curves, and a steady flow of noiseless traffic.

  "How many of them are there?" he whispered.

  "Billions, I should think." Ekaterina laid a chilled hand on his. Her hazel eyes were stretched open with a sort of terror. "But it is so still!"

  Great blue-white flashes of energy went between kilometer-high spires. Now and then a musical symbol quivered over the metal reaches of the city. But no one spoke. There was no loitering, no hesitation, no disorder, such as even the most sovietized city of Earth would know.

  Grushenko shook his head. "I wonder if we can even speak with them," he admitted in a lost voice. "What does a dog have to say to a man?" Then, straightening himself : "But we are going to try!"

  At the end of a long flight, they landed on a flange, dizzyingly far above the street (?). Watching Zolotoyan hands on the platform controls, Holbrook found the steering mechanism superbly simple. But then he was urged through an arched doorway and down a dim corridor of polished blue stone. He saw faint grooves worn in the floor. This place was old.

  Ekaterina whispered to him, "Eben Petrovitch,"—she had never so called him before—"have you seen even one ornament here? One little picture or calendar or … anything? I would give a tooth for something humanly small."

  "The city is its own ornament," said Grushenko. His words came louder than required.

  They reached a dead-end wall. One of the black figures touched a stud, and the wall dilated.

  Beyond was a room so large that Holbrook could not make out its ceiling through the sourceless muted radiance. But he saw the machine that waited, tier upon tier where tiny red lights crawled like worms, and he saw a hundred silent green-clad Zolotoyans move through the intricate rituals of servicing it. "A computer," he mumbled. "In t
en thousand years we may be able to build a computer like that."

  A guard trilled to a technician. The technician waved calmly at some others, who hurried to him. They conferred in a few syllables and turned to the humans with evident purpose.

  "Gospodny pomiluie," breathed Ekaterina. "It is a … a routine! How many like us have come here?"

  Holbrook felt himself shoved onto a metal plate in the floor. He braced himself for death, for enlightenment, for God. But the machine only blinked and muttered. A technician stepped up with an instrument, touched it to Holbrook's neck, and withdrew an unfelt few cubic centimeters of blood. He bore it off into twilight. Holbrook waited.

  The machine spoke. It was hard to tell its voice from the sweet Zolotoyan trills. The guards leveled their guns. Holbrook gasped and ran toward Ekaterina. Two black giants caught and held him.

  "By heaven," he found himself howling, foolish and futile melodrama in the twilight, "if you touch her, you bastards—!"

  "Wait, Eben Petrovitch," she called. "We can only wait."

  Hands felt over his garments. An instrument buzzed. A Zolotoyan reached into Holbrook's pocket and took out a jack-knife. His watch was pulled off his wrist, the helmet off his head. "Judas priest," he exclaimed, "we're being frisked!"

  "Potential weapons are being removed," said Grushenko.

  "You mean they don't bother to look at our spaceship, but can't tell a watch isn't a deadly weapon—hey!" Holbrook grabbed at a hand which fumbled with his air compressor.

  "Submit," said Grushenko. "We can survive without the apparatus." He began to point at objects, naming them. He was ignored.

  CHAPTER V

  Beyond the chamber was another hall, and at its end was another room. It was a small, bare, windowless cell of the same blue stone. Dull light came from the walls themselves, a waste-disposal hole opened downward, a porous circle in the ceiling breathed fresh air. Otherwise the place was featureless. When the black guards had urged the humans through and the dilated wall had returned to a blank barrier, they were alone.