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 beyond 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."