The ties of home were strong. In a few years man gets attached to bricks and mortar, and scenery. In a hundred years roots are so deep that no one wants to tear them up. In a thousand years it is quite unthinkable. In a million years, only a lunatic would want to leave... Then came the alien, presenting an impossible choice... Humanity must leave the Earth - or die! Behind them was everything they had known. In front of them, an unknown to-morrow. Which were the greater - the hazards remaining or the dangers of the infinite void ahead? Could they trust the alien? He said there was another world, a safe world, that would be a new home - but was it all a trap? There were dangers out there. The dangers of a population confined in ships for a half a life-time; the dangers of cosmic radiation; danger of attacks by the 'Others'! Only men of the highest courage and the greatest integrity could hope to survive in the raw, searing savagery of the unknown...
Release date:
December 19, 2013
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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ANDRAC switched on the televiewer and peered out at the surface of the planet that was sweeping up to meet him, ran thin, æsthetic fingers through curly grey hair, and then switched off. There were nothing that the televiewer could tell him that he did not already know, nothing that he was not fully aware of from his memo-readings of the hundreds of reports which the advance agents had taken and sent in to him. He shrugged stooping shoulders and turned back to the controls. It was too late to go back now, he reflected. Besides, what was the point of going back, anyway? He stood by his controls for a long time in thoughtful silence, in this one-man ship that he flew.
Space is very big, and man is very small—even a man with the brain of Andrac. Those long fingers, æsthetic fingers, raced over the keys, making sense, making a pattern, making a gestalt out of the infernal complexity of the controls.
He checked his course for the last time, put the automatic landing gear into operation, and went back to the televiewer. Landscapes were opening out beneath him now, mountains and seas; hills, rivers, valleys, fields, towns, cities, roads; flashing by with swift panorama, as the ship screamed in to its appointed rendezvous. The earlier expeditions had chosen this place well. The reconnaissance craft knew their stuff. Andrac had no fear as far as the landing went—physically, that was. He knew the landing would be as perfect as it was possible for science to make it. It wasn’t a crash, or the thought of a crash, that produced beads of cold sweat on his high sensitive forehead. It was the thought of what they were doing, of what they were going to do. The thought of what had to be done. The enormity of it! He drew a deep breath, wondering, deep down in his heart of hearts, whether it was not asking too much of any man to attempt such a vast, almost unbelievably vast undertaking.
It was a colossal piece of work. Something on a scale that had never been attempted before. He bit his thin, trembling lip; switched off the televiewer again, drew a self-lighting cigret from his tunic pocket, and inhaled deeply. It wasn’t nicotine, it was half a dozen other drugs and compounds skilfully mixed. It soothed the nerves and stimulated the mind, and he wanted to be soothed and stimulated right then. Wanted it very badly.
The landing was accomplished.
He climbed down from the ship and checked his equipment, the exchange units which these creatures used. He had them. The reconnaissance men had done a wonderful job. They had provided him with money, with clothes such as the inhabitants wore; he had been perfectly drilled on their habits, their customs, their institutions. He knew their social framework, their economic structure. He had to be able to fit in as one of them, he had to be accepted for long enough to enable him to reach the people that he had to reach.
The Council had spent long hours discussing it. One approach after another had been suggested, discussed and abandoned …
It was agreed that this method of infiltration was the only one which would allow them to achieve their objectives. Andrac hoped the Council had been right. If the Council was not right, it was Andrac’s neck that was being risked. He did not find the thought a particularly pleasant one! But somebody had to go, somebody had to do the job. Andrac had the knowledge and a highly assimilative memory. There were other factors in his favour, and by the time the Selection Board had whittled down the applicants—“applicants”, thought Andrac, that was interesting! There had been no applicants. They had simply listed the names of the most likely men, and crossed them off one by one, until he, Andrac, had been landed with the mission. He shrugged again those stooping shoulders, and ran a hand through his curly grey hair.
As his fingers came down again, one grey hair lay in the palm of his hand. He looked at it; it reminded him of his age, chances he had missed, opportunities that had gone past.
Reminded him, too, that his life wasn’t worth that much, compared with the size of the project he was undertaking. He drew a deep breath, walked away from the ship; looked back at it. ‘Treading on alien soil,’ he told himself. He’d got it all in theory, this was practice, this was the real thing. This wasn’t just a matter of reading it up on text books; listening to it on the microtape; this is it!
He swallowed hard, the ship was a link with home, a big link. It was also an escape route, but orders were orders. And after all, the Council had agreed.
Andrac looked at it resignedly; something that might have been a tear tried to find its way into his eye. It was a dam’ good ship! It had seen him through hyper space. Seen him through all the mysteries, and the weirdness, and the dangers of the void, and how was he to reward it? He took the tiny capsule from his belt—no bigger, was it, than the end joint of his finger—there were two tiny indentations in the side. He held the capsule to his ear, and squeezed gently till he heard the click. It was ready. He looked once more at the ship, and a tiny wave of regret swept over him. Orders were orders. These inhabitants of the nine-planet system with the dwarf sun must not know that there was a stranger in their midst. There was nowhere to hide a space ship effectively—not even a small one—Andrac threw the capsule …
The ship disappeared in a blinding white flash of heat, flame and smoke.
He felt as though he had just killed a faithful friend, the ship had gone. A few particles of white ash blew away in the breeze. He was in semi-desert country, sparsely populated, hot, turgid, unpleasant. Not the kind of country he wanted to be in.
The reconnaissance men had already told him it was not one of the high civilisation areas. The kind of men he sought would be concentrated elsewhere.
He strode across the sand to a roadway and stood waiting, wondering—left or right? He consulted a compass, which he had been told was a standard implement for navigation and direction-finding on this planet. It relied on the planet’s own magnetic field. A crude but rather interesting device…
He looked up. The star of this rather odd little system on the galactic rim was practically straight ahead. Surprising how much heat it gave out, he thought. He knew he was pretty near the Equator. It had all been planned—carefully planned—long planned by the Council. He began to walk, westward for perhaps an hour, stopping for occasional sips of water, stopping to look at the sun; stopping to look at the ridge of low dune-hills in the desert sand.
A truck came, drew level, stopped, a friendly, rather weather-beaten face thrust itself from the driving window.
“You wanna lift, Mac?”
“Thanks,” said Andrac. “I only hope the language indoctrination is perfect,” he thought. “Still, from the primitive state of civilisation prevalent upon this planet, so many dialects are actually spoken that no one native is expected to know them all sufficiently well to know whether a human is a native of the world, or an alien—like myself.”
The driver was fitting nicely into the reconnaissance plan. He raised an eyebrow quizzically.
“Say, that’s a helluva an accent you got there, buddy. American? Austrian? Don’t tell me, let me guess.”
Andrac was more than content to let him guess.
“Obersylesia,” he said at last.
“Right on,” said Andrac.
“I know a lot about accents,” said the big American truck driver. “You get around a bit, in this business. Anyway, hop in, pal!”
Andrac “hopped” with alacrity and settled down beside the earthman, the first of the breed that he had met. He looked at him from beneath lowered lids as the big Yank let in the clutch and the truck roared away across the desert road.
“Where’re you heading for, in particular?” asked the trucky.
“Nowhere special,” answered Andrac. “Just somewhere a bit more civilised than out here.”
“How’d you get out here in the first place?” It was just loquaciousness, there was no edge to the question, but it sent a cold thrill of fear through the alien. If one of the ordinary, non-scientific earthmen had as much acumen and intelligence as this—was it acumen and intelligence, or was it just friendly curiosity? He tried hard to remember. He believed that they did ask each other these kind of questions, not through any interest in what the answers might be, simply out of some kind of friendly social relationship.
“I had a lift with a fella—he wasn’t going any further. . .
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