Ship of Strangers

by Bob Shaw

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The chronicle of adventures of the survey ship Sarafand as it journeys through space exploring and mapping newly-discovered planets. The mission brings them into contact with man startling life-forms and menacing aliens. On one world the Sarafand sends out six survey modules and seven return: one of them is a shape-changing malevolent alien - but which? On another planet they discover a humanoid civilisation which can move around in time. Suddenly the Sarafand investigators are marooned millions of years in the past. Finally the Sarafand and its crew are stranded in a distant galaxy where everything - including them - is shrinking inexorably to zero size...

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 154

Sample

Candar waited seven thousand years before he saw his second spaceship.

He had been little more than a cub when he saw the first, but the images of that event were still bright and sharp in his memory. It had been a warm, moist morning and his mother and father had just begun cutting through a village of the two-legged food creatures. Candar was quietly watching their great grey bodies at work when his long-range senses warned him he was being approached by something very large, something which was outside all his previous experience. He raised his head, alarmed, but his parents – their perceptions swamped by the abundance of red-reeking food – remained unaware of the menace until it came into view.

The ship came in low, and was travelling so fast that the damp air was compressed into opaque grey clouds inside the shock waves created by its blunt nose. The clouds swirled around it like a tattered cloak, so that the ship skipped in and out of visibility, and Candar wondered how anything could move at such a speed and not make any sound. For a moment he was entranced by the realization that the universe contained beings whose powers were equal to, or perhaps greater than, those of his own kind.

It was not until after the big ship had passed overhead that the awful sound of it came hammering down, levelling the food creatures’ flimsy huts even more efficiently than mother and father could have done. The ship banked sharply, halted high in the morning air, and suddenly Candar and his parents were lifted into the sky. Candar found that he was caught in some kind of force net. He measured its shifting frequencies, wave lengths, intensity gradients, and even discovered that his brain could produce a similar field of its own – but he could not break free of the invisible constraints which had clamped around his body.

He and his parents were swept upwards to where the sky turned black and Candar could hear the stars. The sun rapidly grew larger and then, some time later, his mother and father were released. They dwindled out of sight in a few seconds and Candar, already adapting to the strange new environment, deduced that they had been steered into a course which terminated in the sun’s bright furnace. Judging by their frantic struggles as they shrank into the distance, his mother and father had performed the same calculation.

Candar dismissed them from his thoughts and tried to anticipate his own fate. There were many sentient beings within the ship, with life-glows not greatly different from those of the food creatures, but they were too remote and too well screened for him to exert any influence on their actions. He ceased the futile twisting and flailing of his body as the sun began to grow smaller. As it became just another star, and eventually faded away altogether, time ceased to have any meaning for Candar.

He remained quiescent until he perceived that a double star was brightening and apparently expelling all others from its vicinity. It blossomed and became two egg-shaped suns courting each other in binary ritual. The ship located a planet of black rock which wobbled in a precarious and highly elliptical orbit between the suns. There, far above the barren surface, it released Candar from its grip. Only by converting his body into skeins of organic rope did he survive the fall. And by the time he had reformed his sense organs the ship was gone.

Candar knew that he had been imprisoned. He also knew that on this world which could carry no trace of food he would eventually die, and there was nothing he could do but wait for that unthinkable event to take place.

His new world made its painful run between the two suns every year. Each time it did so the black rock melted and flowed like mud, and nothing survived unchanged except Candar.

And it was seven thousand years before he saw his second spaceship.

The thing Dave Surgenor detested most about high-gravity planets was the speed at which beads of sweat could move. A trickle of perspiration could form on the brow and, with a rush like that of an attacking insect, be down the side of his face and under his collar before he could raise a hand to defend himself. In his sixteen years of survey work he had never become used to it.

‘If this wasn’t my last trip,’ Surgenor said quietly, dabbing his neck, ‘I’d refuse to do any more.’

‘Can I have time to think about the logic of that one?’ Victor Voysey, who was on his second mapping expedition, kept his eyes on the survey module’s controls. The forward view plate, as it had done for days, showed nothing more than ripple patterns of sterile igneous rock unfolding before the vehicle’s headlight, but Voysey stared at it like a tourist on an exotic pleasure cruise.

‘You’ve got time to think about it,’ Surgenor said. ‘That’s what you get most of in this job – time to sit on your backside and twiddle your thumbs and think about things. Mainly you try to think of some reason for not quitting the job the first chance you get – and that’s a nice exercise in ingenuity.’

‘Money.’ Voysey was trying to sound cynical. ‘That’s why everybody signs on. And stays on.’

‘It isn’t worth it.’

‘I’ll agree with you when I’ve made a bundle like yours.’

Surgenor shook his head. ‘You’re making a terrible mistake, Victor. You’re trading your life – the only one they issue you with – for money, for the privilege of altering the positions of a few electrons in a credit computer, and it’s a bad deal, Victor. No matter how much money you make you’ll never be able to buy this time back again.’

‘The trouble with you, Dave, is that you’re getting …’ Voysey hesitated and tried to wrestle the sentence on to a new track ‘… getting that you can’t remember what it’s like to need money.’

Getting old, Surgenor concluded on his partner’s behalf, and decided to talk about something else.

‘I’ll make you a side bet, ten creds to your single, that we see the ship from the top of this rise.’

‘Already!’ Voysey, ignoring the proposed wager, leaned forward and started tapping buttons on the range finder panel.

Surgenor, smiling a little at the younger man’s excitement, rearranged his limbs on the cushioned seat and tried to make himself comfortable. It seemed like centuries since the mother ship had set its six survey modules down at the black planet’s south pole and then had ghosted back into the sky to do a half circuit and land at the north pole. The ship would have completed the journey in less than an hour – the men in the modules had had to sweat it out under three gravities for twelve days as their machines zigzagged along the planet’s surface. Had there been an atmosphere they could have switched to ground-effect suspension and travelled twice as fast, but this planet – one of the least hospitable Surgenor had ever seen – made no concessions of any kind to unwanted visitors.

The survey module reached the top of the crest and the horizon, which was the line separating starry blackness from dead blackness, dropped away in front. Surgenor saw the clustered lights of the mother ship, the Sarafand, down on the plain about ten kilometres from him.

‘You were right, Dave,’ Voysey said, and Surgenor repressed a grin at the note of respect in his voice. ‘I think we’re going to be first back, too. I don’t see any other lights.’

Surgenor nodded as he scanned the pool of night, looking for the wandering glow-worms which would have represented other returning vehicles. Strictly speaking, all six modules should have been exactly the same distance out from the Sarafand in their respective directions, ranged in a perfect circle. During the greater part of the journey the vehicles had adhered rigidly to the survey pattern so that the data they were transmitting to the mother ship always reached it from six equally distant, equally spaced points. Any deviation from the pattern would have caused distortions in the planetary maps being built in the ship’s computer deck. But each module had a minimum awareness radius of five hundred kilometres, with the result that when they got to within that distance of the mother ship the remaining territory had already been mapped six times over, and the job was well and truly finished. It was an unofficial tradition that the last five-hundred-kilometre leg of a survey was an out-and-out race for home, with champagne for the winners and appropriate salary deductions for the others.

Module Five, which was Surgenor’s vehicle, had just skirted a low but jagged range of peaks and he guessed that at least two of the others would have been forced to go over the top and lose time. Somehow, in spite of all the years and light-years, he felt a renewal of the competitive urge. It could be pleasant, if not altogether appropriate, to finish his career in the Cartographical Service with a champagne toast.

‘Here we go,’ Voysey said as the vehicle gathered speed on the downward slope. ‘A shower, a shave and champagne – what more could you ask for?’

‘Well, even if we stick to the alliteration, and decide to omit vulgarities,’ Surgenor replied, ‘there’s steak, sex, sleep …’

He stopped speaking as the voice of Captain Aesop on board the Sarafand boomed from the radio grille mounted above the view plates.

‘This is the Sarafand speaking to all survey modules. Do not continue your approach. Cut your motors and remain where you are until further notification. This is an order.’

Before Aesop’s voice had died away the radio silence that had been observed during the homeward race was broken as startled and angry comments from the other modules crashed from the loudspeaker. Surgenor felt the first cool feather-flick of alarm – Aesop had sounded as though something was seriously wrong. And Module Five was still churning its way down into the blackness of the polar plain.

‘It must be some kind of fault in the mapping procedures,’ Surgenor said, ‘but you’d better cut the motors anyway.’

‘But this is crazy! Aesop must be out of his tiny little mind. What could go wrong?’ Voysey sounded indignant. He made no move to touch the motor controls.

Without warning an ultralaser burst from the Sarafand splintered the night into dazzling fragments and the hillside lifted skywards in front of Module Five. Voysey hit the brakes and the vehicle slid to a halt on the glowing edges of the ultralaser scar. Falling rock hammered on the roof in an irregular, deafening frenzy, then there was silence.

‘I told you Aesop was out of his mind,’ Voysey said numbly, almost to himself. ‘Why did he do a thing like that?’

‘This is the Sarafand,’ the radio blared again. ‘I repeat – no survey module is to attempt to approach the ship. I will be forced to destroy any other module which fails to obey this order.’

Surgenor pressed the button which put him in contact with the mother ship.

‘This is Surgenor in Module Five, Aesop,’ he said quickly. ‘You had better tell us what’s going on.’

‘I intend to keep all crew members fully informed.’ There was a pause, then Aesop spoke again. ‘The problem is that six vehicles went out on this survey – and seven have come back. I hardly need to point out that this is one too many.’

*

With a spasm of alarm Candar realized he had made a mistake. His fear stemmed not from the fact that the strangers had discovered his presence among them, nor that they had reasonably potent weapons – it came from the knowledge that he had made such an elementary and avoidable error. The slow process of his physical and mental deterioration must have gone much further than he had appreciated.

The task of reforming his body to look like one of the travelling machines had been a difficult one, but not as difficult as the vast cellular reorganization which enabled him to survive when the two suns had grown huge and both were in the sky at once. His mistake had been in allowing the machine whose shape he had reproduced to come within range of the scanning device inside the large machine towards which the others were heading. He had allowed the small machine to draw away from him while he went through the agony of transformations and then, when he went after it, had become aware of the pulsing spray of electrons sweeping over him.

Crazed with hunger though he was, Candar had tested the fine sleet of particles and it occurred to him almost at once that they were being emitted by a surveillance system. He should have deduced in advance that creatures with the feeble sense organs he had perceived would have striven for something to widen their awareness of the universe – especially the creatures who would take the trouble to build such complicated vehicles. For an instant he considered absorbing all electrons which touched his skin, thereby rendering himself invisible to the scanning device, but decided that doing so would defeat his purpose. He was already within visual range of the largest machine, and the displaying of any unusual characteristics would make him instantly identifiable to the watchers inside.

Candar’s alarm faded away as, with another part of his sensory network, he picked up the currents of fear and bewilderment stirring in the minds of the beings in the machine nearest to him. Minds like these, especially housed in bodies like these, could never present any serious problem – all he had to do was await the opportunity which was bound to occur very soon.

He crouched on the cracked surface of the plain, most of the metallic elements in his system transferred to the periphery of his new shape, which was now identical to that of the travelling machines. A small part of his energy was going into producing light, which he beamed out in front, and another minute fraction of it was devoted to controlling the radiations reflected by his skin, thus obscuring his individuality.

He was Candar, the most intelligent, talented and powerful single entity in the universe – and all he had to do was wait.

The standard intercom speakers fitted in geodesic survey vehicles were, in spite of their small size, very effective pieces of equipment. Surgenor had never heard of one being overloaded before, but immediately following Aesop’s announcement communication was lost as every module crew reacted in surprise or disbelief. A defence mechanism caused him to stare at the speaker grille in mild wonderment while another part of his mind assimilated Aesop’s news.

A seventh module had appeared on an airless world which was not only uninhabited but, in the strictest clinical sense of the word, sterile. Not even the toughest known bacteria or virus could survive when Prila I ran the gamut of its double sun. It was totally unthinkable that an extra survey vehicle could have been awaiting the Sarafand’s arrival, and yet that was what Aesop claimed – and Aesop never made a mistake. The cacophony from the loudspeaker quieted abruptly as Aesop came on the air again.

‘I am open for suggestions regarding our next move, but they must be made one at a time.’

The hint of reproof in Aesop’s voice was enough to damp the noise level to a background rumble, but Surgenor could sense a growing panic. The root cause of the trouble was that operating a geodesic survey module had never become a genuine profession – because it was too easy. It was a casual, big-money job that smart young men went into for two or three years in order to raise capital for business ventures, and when signing on they practically demanded a written guarantee that there would never be any interruption in the profitable routine. Now, on this unprecedented occasion, something had gone wrong, and they were worried. Their jobs had been created largely by trade union pressures – it would have been a simple matter to automate the survey modules to the same extent as the mother ship – but at the first demand for a flexible response to an unforeseen event, the basis of the unions’ arguments, they were both resentful and afraid.

Surgenor felt a flicker of annoyance at his team-mates, then remembered that he, too, was planning to pocket his profits and bow out. He had joined up sixteen years earlier, along with two of his space-struck cousins, and they had stayed for seven years before quitting and going into the plant-hire business. Most of his accumulated salary was in the business with them, but now Carl and Chris. . .