THE HIGH ONES

CHAPTER I

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."

CHAPTER II

The officers of the Rurik sat at a long rough table, under trees whose rustling was not quite like that of any trees on Earth. They looked toward Holbrook and Grushenko, and they listened.

"So we got the jet aloft," finished Holbrook. "We, uh, took a long route home—didn't see any, uh, pursuit—" He swore at himself and sat down. "That's all, I guess."

Captain Svenstrup stroked his red beard and said heavily: "Well, ladies and gentlemen. The problem is whether we hide out for a while in hopes of some lucky chance, or evacuate this system at once."

"You forget that we might fight!"

Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov said it in a voice that rang. The blood leaped up in her wide, high-boned face; under her battered cap, Tau Ceti tinged the short wheaten hair with copper.

"Fight?" Svenstrup skinned his teeth. "A hundred humans, one spaceship, against a whole planet?"

The young woman rose to her feet. Even through the baggy green tunic and breeches of her uniform—she had clung to it after the mutiny, Red Star and all—she was big and supple. Holbrook's heart stumbled, rose again, and hurried through a dark emptiness. She clapped a hand to her pistol and said: "But they do not belong on this planet. They must be strangers too, as far from home as we. Shall we run just because their technology is a little ahead of ours? My nation never felt that was an excuse to surrender her own soil!"

"No," mumbled Domingo Ximénez. "Instead you went on to plunder the soil of everyone else."

"Quiet, there!" roared Svenstrup.

His eyes flickered back and forth, down the table and across the camp. Just inside the forest, a log cabin stood half erected; but the Finnish couple who had been making it now crouched with the rest of the crew, among guns and silence. The captain tamped tobacco into his pipe and growled: "We are all here together, Reds and Whites alike. We cannot even return to Earth without filling the ship's reaction-mass tanks, and we need a week or more just to refine enough water. Meanwhile, non-humans are operating a mine and have killed one of us without any provocation we can imagine. They could fly over and drop one nuclear bomb, and that would be the end of man on Novaya. I'm astonished that they haven't so far."

"Or haven't even been aware of us," murmured Ekaterina. "Our boats were coming and going for a pair of months or three. Did they not notice our jet trails above the mountains? Comrades, it does not make sense!"

Ximénez said very low: "How much sense would a mind which is not human make to us?"

He crossed himself.

The gesture jarred Holbrook. Had the government of the United World S.S.R. been that careless? Crypto-libertarians had gotten aboard the Rurik , yes, but a crypto-believer in God?

Grushenko saw the movement too. His mouth lifted sardonically. "I would expect you to substitute word magic for thought," he declared. To Svenstrup: "Captain, somehow, we have alarmed the aliens—possibly we happen to resemble another species with which they are at war—but their reasoning processes must be fundamentally akin to ours, simply because the laws of nature are the same throughout the universe. Including those laws of behavior first seen by Karl Marx."

"Pseudo-laws for a pseudo-religion!" Holbrook was surprised at himself, the way he got it out.

Ekaterina lifted one dark brow and said, "You do not advance our cause by name calling, Lieutenant Golbrok." Dryly: "Especially when the epithets are not even original."

He retreated into hot-faced wretchedness. But I love you , he wanted to call out. If you are Russian and I am American, if you are Red and I am White, is that a wall between us through all space and time? Can we never be simply human, my tall darling?

"That will do," said Svenstrup. "Let's consider practicalities. Dr. Sugimoto, will you give us the reasons you gave me an hour ago, for assuming that the aliens come from Zolotoy?"

Holbrook started. Zolotoy—the next planet out, gold-colored in the evening sky—the enemy belonged to this same system? Then there was indeed no hope but another plunge into night.

The astronomer rose and said in singsong Russian: "It is unlikely that anyone would mine the planets of another star on so extensive a scale. It does not appear economically feasible, even if one had a spaceship which could travel nearly at light-velocity. Now long-range spectroscopy has shown Zolotoy to have a thin but essentially terrestroid atmosphere. The aliens were not wearing air suits, merely some kind of respirator—I think probably it reduces the oxygen content of their inhalations—but at any rate, they must use that gas, which is only found free on Zolotoy and Novaya in this system. The high thin bipedal shape also suggests life evolved for a lower gravity than here. If they actually heard our scouts, such sensitive ears probably developed in more tenuous air." He sat down again and drummed on the table top with jittery fingers.

"I suppose we should have sent boats to all the other planets before landing on this one," said Svenstrup heavily. "But there was too much impatience, the crew had been locked up too long."

"The old captain would not have tolerated such indiscipline," said Ekaterina.

"I won't tolerate much more from you, either." Svenstrup got his pipe going. "Here is my plan, We must have more information. I am going to put the Rurik into an orbit skewed to the ecliptic plane, as safe a hiding place as any. A few volunteers will stay hidden on Novaya, refining reaction-mass water and maintaining radio contact with the ship; everyone else will wait up there. One boat will go to Zolotoy and learn what it can. Its crew will not know the Rurik's orbit; they'll report back here. Then we can decide what to do."

He finished grayly: "If the boat returns at all, of course."

Grushenko stood up. Something like triumph blazed in him. "As a politico-military specialist, I have been selected and trained for linguistic ability," he said. "Furthermore, I have had combat experience in suppressing the Brazilian capitalist uprising. I volunteer myself for the boat."

"Good," said Svenstrup. "We need about two more."

Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov smiled and said in her low, oddly gentle voice, "If a Ukrainian like Comrade Grushenko goes, a Great Russian must also be represented." Her humor faded and she went on earnestly, overriding the captain, "My sex has nothing to do with it. I am a gunnery officer of the World Soviet Space Fleet. I spent two years on Mars, helping to establish a naval outpost. I feel myself qualified."

Somehow, Holbrook was standing up. He stuttered incoherently for a moment. Their eyes speared him, a big square-faced young man with rumpled brown hair, brown eyes nearsighted behind contact lenses, his body drab in coveralls and boots. He got out finally: "Let Bunin take my post. I, I, I can find out something about their machinery—"

"Or die with the others," said Svenstrup. "We need you here."

Ekaterina spoke quietly. "Let him come, captain. Shall not an American also have the right to dare?"

CHAPTER III

The boat ran swiftly, accelerating on ion drive until Novaya was only one blue spark of beauty and Zolotoy became an aureate shield. There was much silence aboard. Watching his companions, Holbrook found time to think.

Grushenko said at last, "There must be some point of agreement with them. It is impossible that they could be imperialists."

Ekaterina curved her lips in a sad little grin. "Was it not impossible that disloyal elements could get onto the Rurik ?"

"There were traitors on the selection board," said Grushenko. His voice darkened. "They were to choose from many nations; man's first voyage beyond the sun was to be a symbol of the brotherhood of all men in the World Soviets. And who did they pick? Svenstrup! Ximénez! Bunin! Golbrok!"

"Enough," said the woman. "Now we have only one cause, to survive."

Grushenko regarded her from narrowed glacial eyes. "Sometimes I wonder about your own loyalty, Comrade Saburov. You accepted the mutiny as an accomplished fact, without even trying to agitate—you have fully cooperated with Svenstrup's regime—this will not be forgotten when we get back to Earth."

"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 yourself 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 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.

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.

They felt drained and light-headed in the thin atmosphere. Its dryness caught at their throats and its cold gnawed toward their bones. But most terrible, perhaps, was the silence.

Holbrook said at last, for them all: "Now what?"

Unhelmeted, Ekaterina's sunlight-colored hair seemed to crackle with frost. Suddenly his living universe had narrowed to her—though he could do worse, he thought in the dimness—with Grushenko hovering on its fringes. Beyond, mystery; the stone walls enclosed him like the curvature of space. The woman said with a forlorn boldness, the breath smoking from her lips, "I suppose they will feed us. Else it would have been most logical just to shoot us. But they do not seem to care if we die of pneumonia."

"Can we eat their food?" muttered Holbrook. "The odds are against it, I'd say. Too many incompatible proteins. The fact we can live on Novaya is nearly a miracle, and Zolotoy isn't that Earthlike."

"They are not stupid," snorted Grushenko. "On the basis of our blood samples they can synthesize an adequate diet for us."

"And yet they took our metallic possessions—even the most harmless." Ekaterina sat down, shivering. "And that computer, did it not give them orders? Is the computer the most powerful brain on this planet?"

"No." Holbrook joined her on the floor. Oxygen lack slowed his thoughts, but he plowed doggedly toward an idea. "No, I don't believe in robots with creative minds. That's what intelligence itself is for. You wouldn't build a machine to eat for you, or ... or make love ... or any truly human function. Machines are to help, to amplify, to supplement. That thing is a gigantic memory bank, a symbolic logic manipulator, what you like; but it is not a personality."

"But then why did they obey it?" she cried.

Grushenko smiled wearily. "I suppose a clever dog might wonder why a man obeys his slide rule," he said.

"A good enough analogy," said Holbrook. "Here's my guess. It's obvious the Zolotoyans have been civilized for a very long time. So I imagine they visited all the nearer stars ... ages ago, maybe. They took data home with them. That computer is, as Ekaterina said a few hundred years back, the commissar of interstellar relations. It has all the data. It identifies us, our home planet—"

"Yes, of course!" exclaimed Grushenko. "At this moment, the rulers of Zolotoy—whatever they have, perhaps the entire population—they are studying the report on us!"

Ekaterina closed her eyes. "And what will they decide?" she asked in a dead voice.

"They will send someone to learn our language, or teach us theirs," said Grushenko. A lift of excitement came to him, he paced up and down, his boots clacked on the floor and his face became a harsh mask of will. "Yes. The attack on us at the mine was a mistake of some kind. We must assume that, comrades, because if it was not we are certainly doomed. Now we have a chance to reason with them. And they can restore the rightful captaincy to the Rurik !"

Holbrook looked up, startled. After a moment: "What makes you so sure they will?"

"There is much we can offer them—it may be necessary to conceal certain elements, in the interests of the larger truth, but—"

"Do you expect to fool a superman?"

"I can try," said Grushenko simply. "Assuming that there is any need to. Actually, I think they are sure to favor the Red side. Marxist principles would seem to predict that much. However...."

A minute longer he rubbed his jaw, pondering. Then he planted himself, big and heavy, in front of Holbrook. He looked down from his height and snapped: "I will be the only one who talks to them. Do you understand?"

The American stood up. The motion made his head swim. But he cocked his fists and said in anger, "Just how do you expect to prevent me ... comrade?"

"I am the better linguist," said Grushenko. "I am sure to be talking to them while you still flounder about trying to tell the syllables apart. But there are two sovietists here. Between us we can forbid you even to attempt it."

Holbrook stared at the woman. She rose too, but backed away. One hand lifted to her mouth. "Ilya Feodorovitch," she whispered. "We are three human creatures."

"Comrade Saburov," said Grushenko in an iron tone, "I make this a test of your loyalty. If you wish to commit treason, now is your time."

Her gaze was wild upon Holbrook. He saw the tides of blood go through her skin, until they drained and she stood white and somehow empty.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, comrade."

"Good." Warmth flowed into the deep voice. Grushenko laid his hands upon her shoulders, searched her eyes, suddenly embraced her. "Thank you, Ekaterina Ivanovna!" He stepped back, and Holbrook saw the heavy hairless face blush like a boy's. "Not for what you do," breathed Grushenko. "For what you are."

She stood quiet a long time. Finally she looked at Holbrook with eyes gone cat-green and said like a mechanism: "You understand you will keep yourself in the background, say nothing and make no untoward gestures. If necessary, we two can kill you with our hands."

And then suddenly she went to a corner, sat down and hugged her knees and buried her face against them.

Holbrook lowered himself. His heart thuttered, wild for oxygen; he felt the cold strike into his throat. He had not been so close to weeping since the hour his mother died.

But—

He avoided Grushenko's hooded stare; he retreated into himself and buckled on the armor of an engineer's workaday soul. There were problems to solve; well, let them be solved, as practical problems in a practical universe. For even this nightmare planet was real. Even it made logical sense; it had to, if you could only see clearly.

He faced a mighty civilization, perhaps a million years old, which maintained interplanetary travel, giant computers, all the intricacies of a technology he did not begin to comprehend. But it ignored the unhidden human landings on Novaya. But it attacked senselessly when three strangers appeared—and then did not follow up the attack. It captured a space vessel with contemptuous ease, did not even bother to look at the booty, shoved the crew through an obviously cut-and-dried routine and then into this cell; but cosmos crack open, visitors from another star could not be an everyday affair! And it was understandable the Zolotoyans would remove a prisoner's knife, but why his watch? Well, maybe a watch could be turned into a, oh, a hyperspatial lever. Maybe they knew how to pull some such stunt and dared not assume the strangers were ignorant of it. But if so, why didn't they take some precautions with the outworld spaceship? Hell, it could be a nuclear time bomb, for all they knew—

The uniforms, the whole repulsive discipline, suggested a totalitarian state. Could the humans only have encountered a few dull-witted subordinates so far? That would fit the facts.... No, it wouldn't either. Because the overlords, who were not fools, would certainly have been informed of this, and would have taken immediate steps.

Or would they?

Holbrook gasped. "God in heaven!"

"What?" Grushenko trod over to him. "What is it?"

Holbrook struggled to his feet. "Look," he babbled, "we've got to break out of here. It's our death if we don't. The cold alone will kill us. And if we don't get back soon, the others will leave this system. I—"

"You will keep silent when the Zolotoyans arrive," said Grushenko. He raised a fist. "If they do plan to terminate us, we must face it. There is nothing we can do about it."

"But there is, I tell you! We can! Listen—"

The wall dilated.

CHAPTER VI

Three guards stood shoulder to shoulder, their guns pointed inward, their lovely unhuman faces blank. A red-clad being, shorter than they, set down a bowl of stew and a container of water. The food was unidentifiable, but its odor was savory. Holbrook felt sure it had been manufactured for the Terrestrials.

"For the zoo!" he said aloud. And then, wildly: "No, for the filing cabinet. File and forget. Lock us up and throw away the key because there is nothing else they can do with us ."

Ekaterina caught his arm. "Back," she warned.

Grushenko stood making gestures and talking, under the golden eyes of the guards. They loomed over him like idols from some unimaginable futurism. And suddenly the hatred which seethed in Holbrook left him; he knew nothing but pity. He mourned for Zolotoy the damned, which had once been so full of hope.

But he must live. His eyes turned to Ekaterina. He heard the frosty breath rattle in her nostrils. Already the coryza viruses in her bloodstream were multiplying; chill and oxygen starvation had weakened her. Fever would come within hours, death within weeks. And Grushenko would spend weeks trying to communicate. Or if he could be talked around to Holbrook's beliefs, it might be too late: that electronic idiot-savant might decide at any moment that the prisoners were safest if killed—

"I'm sorry," said Holbrook. He punched Ekaterina in the stomach.

She lurched and sat down. Holbrook side-stepped the red Zolotoyan, moved in under the guards, and seized a blast-gun with both hands. He brought up his foot in the same motion, against a bony black-clad knee, and heaved.

The Zolotoyan reeled. Holbrook staggered back, the gun in his hands. The other two guards trilled and slewed their own weapons about. Holbrook whipped the blaster up and squeezed its single switch. Lightning crashed between blue walls.

A signal hooted. Automatic alarms—there would be guards coming, swarming all over, and their only reaction was to kill. "The computer!" bawled Holbrook. "We've got to get the computer!" Two hideously charred bodies were collapsing. The stench of burnt flesh grabbed his gullet.

"You murdering fool!" Grushenko roared it out, leaping at him. Holbrook reversed his blaster and struck with the butt. Grushenko fell to the floor, dazed. The third black Zolotoyan fumbled after a dropped gun. Holbrook destroyed him.

"The computer," he shouted. "It's not a brain, only an automaton." He reached down, caught Ekaterina by the wrist and hauled her up. His heart seemed about to burst; rags of darkness swirled before his eyes. "But it is the interstellar commissar," he groaned. "It's the only thing able to decide about us ... and now it's sure to decide on killing—"

"You're insane!" shrieked the woman, from light-years away. She clawed after his weapon. He swayed in black mists, batted her away with his own strengthless hands.

"I haven't time now," he whispered. "I love you. Will you come with me?"

He turned and staggered through the door, past the scuttering red servitor, over the corpses and into the hall. The siren squealed before him, around him, through him. His feet were leaden clogs; Christ, what had become of the low gravity— help me, help me .

Hands caught his arm. "Lean on me, Eben Petrovitch," she said.

They went down a vaulted corridor full of howling. His temples beat, as if his brain were trying to escape the skull, but vision cleared a little. He saw the wall at the end. He stopped by the control stud.

"Let me go through first," he said in his burning throat. "If the guards get me, remember the computer must be destroyed. We're safe if it can be destroyed. Wait, now."

The wall gaped for him. He stepped through. The green technicians moved serenely under the huge machine, servicing it as if he did not exist. In a way , he thought, I don't . He sped across the floor. His boots resounded hollowly on the stone. He came up to the machine and opened fire.

Thunder roared in the chamber. The technicians twittered and ran around him. One of them posted himself at a board whose pattern of signaling lights was too intricate for men to grasp, and called out orders. The others began to fetch replacement parts. And the siren yammered. It was like no alarm on Earth; its voice seemed almost alive.

Four guards burst in from the outer hall. Holbrook sprang behind a technician, who kept stolidly by his rank of levers. The guards halted, stared around, and began to cast about like sniffing dogs. Holbrook shot past the green Zolotoyan, dropped one, dropped two. A human would have sacrificed the enemy's living shield to get at the enemy; but no black had ever fired on a green. Another guard approached and was killed. But where had the fourth gotten to?

Holbrook heard the noise and whirled about. The gaunt shape had been almost upon him, from the rear. Ekaterina had attacked. They rolled about the floor, she snarling, he with a remote god-like calm even as he wrestled. He got her by the throat. Holbrook ran up behind and clubbed his blaster. After more blows than a man could have survived, the guard slumped.

The woman crawled from beneath, gasping. Holbrook's strength was fled, his lungs one enormous agony. He sank to the floor beside her. "Are you all right?" he forced. "Are you hurt, my dearest?"

"Hold."

They crouched side by side and turned faces which bled from the nose back toward the machine. Ilya Grushenko stood there. A blaster was poised in his hands. "Drop your gun or I shoot," he said. "You and her both."

Holbrook's fingers went slack. He heard the remote clatter of his weapon as it struck stone.

"Thank you, Eben Petrovitch," said Grushenko. "Now they have it proven to them which of our factions is their friend."

"You don't understand!" choked Holbrook. "Listen to me!"

"Be still. Raise your hands. Ah, there—" Grushenko flicked eyes toward a pair of guards trotting into the room. "I have them, comrades!" he whooped.

Their fire converged on him. He ceased to be.

Holbrook had already scooped up his own blaster. He shot down the two black Zolotoyans. He stood up, swaying and still scrabbling after air. Ekaterina huddled at his feet. "You see," he said wearily, "we are in the ultimate collectivist state." She clung to his knees and wept.

He had not fired many bolts into the computer when its siren went quiet. He assumed that the orders it had been giving were thereby canceled. He took the woman and they walked away from the pathetically scurrying greens, out into the hallway, past a few guards who ignored them, and so to a flying platform.

CHAPTER VII

Under the tall fair heaven of Novaya, Holbrook spoke to the chief of the human outpost. "You can call them back from the Rurik ," he said. "There is no more danger."

"But what are the Zolotoyans?" asked Ximénez. His eyes went in fear toward the mountains. "If they are not intelligent beings, then who ... what ... created their civilization?"

"Their ancestors," said Holbrook. "A very long time ago. They were great once. But they ended up with a totalitarian government. A place for everyone and everyone in his place. The holy society, whose very stasis was holy. Specialized breeds for the different jobs. Some crude attempts at it have been made on Earth, too. Egypt didn't change for thousands of years after the pyramids had been built. Diocletian, the Roman emperor, made all occupations hereditary. The Soviets are trying that sort of thing at this moment, if they haven't been overthrown since we left. The Zolotoyans were unlucky: their attempt succeeded."

He shrugged. "When one individual is made exactly like another—when independent thought is no longer needed, is actually forbidden—what do you expect? Evolution gets rid of organs which have stopped being useful. That includes the thinking brain."

"But all that you saw—space travel, police functions, chemical analysis and synthesis, maintaining those wonderful machines—it is all done by instinct?" protested Ximénez. "No, I cannot believe it!"

"Instinct isn't completely rigid, you know," said Holbrook. "Even a simple one-loop homeostatic circuit is amazingly flexible and adaptive. Remember ants or bees or termites on Earth. In their own way, they have societies as intricate as anything known to me. They even have a sort of stylized language, as do our neighbors here. Actually, I suspect the average ant faces more variety and challenge in his life than does the ordinary Zolotoyan. Remember, they have no natural enemies any more; and for tens of thousands of years, all the jobs on that highly automated planet have been stereotyped.

"The mine guards on Novaya ignored our rocket trails beyond the mountains because—oh, to their perception it couldn't have been very different from lightning, say. But they had long ago evolved an instinct to shoot at unknown visitors, simply because large Novayan animals could interfere with operations. At home, they have little or no occasion to fight. But apparently they, like the green technicians, have an inborn obedience to the computer signals."

"Yes," said Ximénez. "The computer, what was it?"

Holbrook sighed. "I suppose it was built in the last dying age of reason. Some atavistic genius (how lonely he must have been!) realized what was happening. Sooner or later, visitors from space were sure to arrive. He wanted to give his descendants at least a little defense against them. He built that machine, which could try to identify them, could give a few simple orders about their disarmament and care and feeding, that sort of thing. He used some controlled-mutation process to breed the technicians that serviced it, and the obedience of the guards. Or perhaps it was enough to institute a set of laws. There'd be natural selection toward an instinct.... It really wasn't much he could do. A poor, clumsy protection against diseases we might have carried, or wanton looting, or...."

Holbrook lifted his face into the wind. Sunlight streamed through summer leaves, it fell like a benediction on him and on the young woman who held his hand. Now, when the technical problem was disposed of, his voice came more slowly and awkwardly:

"I could pity the Zolotoyans, except that they're beyond it. They are as empty of selfhood as insects. But the one who built the computer, can't you almost hear him back in time, asking for our mercy?"

Ximénez nodded. "Well," he said, "I do not see why we should not let the ... fauna ... live. We can learn a great deal from them."

"Including this:" said Holbrook, "that it shall not happen to our race. We've a planet now, and a whole new science to master. Our children or our grand-children will return to Earth."

Ekaterina's hand released his, but her arm went about his waist, drawing him close as if he were a shield. Her eyes ranged the great strange horizon and she asked, very low, "After all that time here, do you think they will care about Earth?"

"I don't know," said Holbrook. He tasted the light like rain on his uplifted face. It was not the sun he remembered. "I don't know, dearest. I don't even know if it matters."