Future Science Fiction - March 1954
(1954)*
Randall Garrett
(illustrated by Frank Kelly Freas)
Was this the Enemy's subtle trap, or was this woman what she claimed to be — an Earthling frozen in suspended animation for three thousand years?
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The prime officer of the Galactic Interstellar Ship Pendar looked carefully at the detector-globe and frowned. "All right," he said, "I give up. What is it?"
The External Security Officer already wore a frown. "It's hard to say, sir. According to the detector, the thing is moving at three-quarters light velocity and has a mass at rest of around twelve thousand tons. Which doesn't make sense."
"Agreed," the Prime said sourly. "If it's a natural body, its velocity in this sector of the Galaxy shouldn't exceed forty miles per second with reference to the Center. If it's a ship, its velocity should be on the order of ten kilolights if it expects to get anywhere in the next couple of centuries."
The ESO, ever in agreement with his superior, nodded, too. "Right. The reason I asked your advice is that the Chief Calculator doesn't give an answer I can act on."
"Give me the CC," the Prime said.
The ESO flipped on the communicator that led to the great robot brain buried in the depths of the ship.
"Calculations reporting," said the speaker.
"What are your findings on this object?" asked the Prime, indicating the detector globe.
"I can only offer two solutions, sir. It is either a ruse of the Great Enemy or it is an obsolete spaceship of our own."
The ESO looked at the Prime as if to say: See? Nonsense! But the Prime didn't agree. A CC didn't give nonsense answers; its answers were in accord with its data. He asked: "What is our best approach?"
"Hard to say," answered the CC candidly. "If it's an Enemy ship, we should try to get more data; if it's an obsolete ship, we can just go up and capture it."
The Prime's frown grew deeper. "But see here—if it's an Enemy, it's at our mercy; we can blast it out of space. On the other hand, even an obsolete craft would be going faster than that if its engines are in working order, if they're not, it couldn't move any faster than—say a thousand miles per second."
"You mistake my meaning, sir. By 'obsolete', I mean that the ship is conceivably three thousand years old. And since this is actually more probable than the other assumption, our best and most favorable action would be a spiral approach. I'll give you the figures if you want them."
The Prime only hesitated a moment. "Very well. If it's an Enemy ship, it would be better for us to die than to let a trick of any kind pass us by."
"Very well, sir." The CC began feeding its calculations into the control mechanisms of the ship.
No ship traveling at less than light velocity can detect a ship traveling at ultralight velocities. The GIS Pendar approached the oddly-moving body without the slightest resistance.
It was an artificially-constructed body, all right—a long, cigar-shaped thing. It took a lot of maneuvering on the part of the Pendar to match the strange ship's velocity, because the Pendar wasn't built for such intermediate speeds.
When they were finally floating in space alongside the hulk, the Prime Officer sent a full-armed party of Space Marines aboard. They found a tomb.
"It's an old ship, all right," said the External Security Officer, who had led the party. "Take a look at this." He held out a photostat of a plaque they had found inside the craft.
The Prime looked at it and then looked at the ESO. "What does it mean?"
"According to the Chief Calculator, it says THIRD INTERSTELLAR EXPEDITION. It's written in ancient Earth English."
"English!" The Prime looked baffled. "Why the thing must be at least three thousand years old!"
"Older, maybe. And there are eight hundred bodies aboard, all frozen solid I"
It was the labs on Kelivar IV that got the ship. There was a lot of wrangling at first, but when the Government declared it a non-military project, all the first three classes of research-teams were automatically dropped from consideration.
Kelivar IV held the best anthropological lab in the Galaxy. It was situated, on the planet's equatorial land-mass, near the Kespin Sea; it was the best, but it had to be satisfied with fourth-class equipment. Anthropology didn't rate very high in the military estimate of sciences necessary for the War Effort.
Dr. Layson Gell was waiting for the ancient ship when it was brought into an orbit around Kelivar IV. When the communicator notified him that it had arrived, he signalled for a flitter to take him up to it, and then turned to Captain Linstet, the military officer assigned to the lab. "She's up there. Want to go with me?"
Linstet nodded. "Definitely, although I don't see any purpose in your going by yourself."
"Preliminary survey," Gell said. Then he grinned. "Besides, I'm not going by myself; you're coming."
Linstet grinned sourly. "'What significance, if any, do you attach to the appearance of this ship at this time?"
Gell shook his head. "None—at least not so far. It will take a thorough investigation of the ship to decide whether anything subtle is being pulled on us."
"Isn't it better to assume—"
"No, dammit, it isn't better to assume anything," Gell said sharply. "This may be an Enemy device, and it may not; they may know what we're going to do about it, and they may not. But the probability-readings are too much to ignore. Look at it this way: If that's an Enemy device, we can destroy it before it can do any widespread harm—that is, assuming it's a physical threat.
"If it's a psychological threat of immediate nature, we can get rid of it in the same way. On the other hand, if it's a psychological time-fuse, set to do us the maximum amount of harm at some unknown time in the future, there's nothing we can do about it."
The captain looked at him sharply. "What do you mean?"
Gell shrugged. "I mean that if we can't figure it out between now and the time it's supposed to act, our Psychological Warfare Department—and our science of psychology—is so far behind theirs that we'd lose anyway."
Linstet's expression showed he didn't like that philosophy of warfare, but he had no argument to counter Gell's reasoning.
The flitter's call-signal notified the, two men that it had landed on the roof. They left Cell's office and took the lifter to the top without saying another word to each other.
Dr. Gell guided the flitter skill-fully through the planet's simmering ionosphere, and on into the relatively-empty vacuum above.
The ancient ship was floating in a nearly-circular orbit that held it stationary above a single spot on the surface of Kelivar IV, since the time required for the ship to make one revolution in its orbit was exactly equal to the time required for the planet to make one rotation on its axis.
Gell matched velocities and looked out the plate at the hulk. He knew that the faint, glittering sparks in the distance were the two cruisers assigned to guard the relic, but he paid them little attention; the signals from his own flitter had identified him automatically.
The old ship, up close, didn't look so bad after all. The surface had been roughed up quite a bit by the particles of interstellar dust that had hit her at point-seven-five light-year velocity during her long voyage; but they had been of atomic size and had hit her evenly without gouging holes. The surface was simply a dead gray in color.
Gell wondered fleetingly how thick the outer hull had been to begin with. The military escort had reported that the ship was at least three thousand years old, but Gell suspected that was an underestimate.
Carefully, he moved the little flitter toward the airlock of the ancient vessel. "All right, Linstet, let's go."
He put on his own suit while the captain dressed, and the two of them walked into the silent hulk.
Gell noticed that the fingers of Linstet's right hand were contracting spasmodically near his hip. The captain was used to boarding dead hulks with the idea that there might—just accidentally might—be a living member of the Enemy aboard. There never had been; no prisoners had ever been captured in the long history of the war—but that didn't keep the captain from being jumpy.
Gell was grinning when he suddenly realized that his own right hand was clenched tightly into a fist, and he knew that he was wishing for a gun himself.
"Was there any air in this thing when they found it?" Linstet asked. His voice was calm in spite of the tension.
Gell shook his head. "No, not according to the Pendar's report. Whether it leaked out gradually over the years, or was released accidentally, is something we'd like to know."
The long, metallic corridors, lit only by the moving spots from the two men's light-beams, brought a phrase to Gell's mind: "hollow echoes". That's what they should have heard, had there been an atmosphere to carry echoes.
There was nothing living aboard the ship; the biometers had shown that. But, according to the report of the CC, there were eight hundred potentially-living things aboard. Gell and Linstet headed toward the compartment where these things were.
It wasn't large. The white, marble-like blocks which encased the bodies were in rows in a compartment about forty feet wide, by thirty feet high, by eighty feet long. Not much space for eight hundred people.
The room was cold, naturally, as a room exposed to the near-absolute zero of interstellar space would be. But Gell noticed that each block was surrounded by tiny coils.
Refrigeration, in case of accidental temperature rise, he thought.
Linstet ran a gloved hand over one of the incredibly-cold blocks. "You can't see anything but the white stuff. How do you know they're inside there?"
"Protein analysis with subetherics. At least I assume so; I'll have a check run, of course, but I imagine the CC of the Pendar was pretty thorough on that point." He paused a moment, looking up and down the rows of si. lent white blocks. "I wonder where they were headed—and why?" he asked softly.
Linstet shrugged. "What I'd like to know is why they're still here. Why didn't they land?"
"Let's look around," Gell answered.
It was a good three hours before they finally discovered what had run the ancient ship off its course. Some bit of cosmic dust had hit the belly of the ship a glancing blow. It couldn't have been very big, not at the rate the ship was moving, for its entrance was marked by a sharply-outlined hole the size of a man's thumb. But the damage it had done was all out of proportion to its size. The little bit of debris, and the metal of the hull it had punched out, had vaporized within the ship; at that temperature, it had wrecked one whole section of the vessel.
It was impossible to tell, from the remains, what mechanisms had been housed there; but it was obvious that the slight impact of the little mote of dust had been the cause of the ship's wayward course.
A fraction of an inch off-course seems small, but at interstellar distances it can mean that a ship passes its destination billions of miles away.
After a thorough examination, Gell and Linstet headed back toward the airlock. "Is that all you wanted to look at?" Linstet asked cautiously.
Gell glanced at him. "I can't tell much on a preliminary survey; I just came up here to see what questions we should ask this hulk."
"Did you get the same questions I did?"
Gell turned and looked at the interior of the ship. "I think so. Didn't you think there was something odd about the instruments and things aboard?"
Linstet nodded. "I didn't recognize a damned one of them!"
Gell looked around the table, and thought, Only seven of us.
It wasn't much of an investigating-crew; not nearly what he needed. The Military had called off three of his best men in the past fifty days, channeling their efforts to "more productive work". Meaning, of course, armaments.
Luckily, the men remaining were good men. If the Military chose men by their intelligence or experience, it would have been a different story. But they wanted technicians and psychologists; they had no use for archeologists.
He wished they'd call Linstet off; it seemed a waste of military power to keep him here. It wasn't that Gell didn't like the man; Linstet was a nice guy and didn't try to throw his weight around. But Gell didn't see
why they'd left him and taken Crosell, for example. Crosell was no genius, but he was a hell of a good technician.
One of the men at the table, Kreyman, spoke: "Dr. Gell, if you're ready, I have the preliminary report."
...
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