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 nose-piece, 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 ten 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 the 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.