Next to him, Stone sat peering endlessly out the vision port at nothing whatever. Realizing that Bernard was awake, Stone turned and flashed a quick, insincere grin, then turned his attention back to the port.
Only Havig seemed at peace with himself and with the mysterious environment outside. The big man leaned back, his long legs stretched forward in a rare gesture of relaxation. A book lay open in Havig’s lap—a prayerbook, probably, Bernard thought. The Neopuritan was turning the pages slowly, nodding, occasionally smiling to himself. He took no notice of anything about him. The very tranquility of the man irritated Bernard obscurely.
Bernard forced himself to stop thinking about the frictions that existed in the cabin, and to ponder the enigmatic nature of the aliens waiting ahead.
He had seen their photos, in tridim and color, and so he had at least a tentative idea of what to expect physically.
But yet he looked forward to the coming meeting with complete uncertainty. Would contact be possible, communication of even the simplest sort? And if they could speak to each other, would an agreement be forthcoming? Or was the civilization of men doomed to be racked by an interstellar war that would send the centuries-old peace imposed by the Archonate crumbling?
The rise of the oligarchy, Bernard thought, had ended the confusion and doubt of the Nightmare Years. But what if the aliens refused to meet and enter into peaceful treaties? What would the strength of the Archonate be worth then?
He had no answers. He forced himself to concentrate on his reading. The hours marched past, until the gong sounded once again, as if foretelling an apocalypse.
The sound of the gong died away. Transition was made.
The vision screen exploded into brilliant life. New constellations; eye-numbing new clusters of stars, perhaps including among them a dot of light that was Earth’s sun.
And, hanging before them like a blazing ball, was a golden-yellow sun darkened by the shadow of planets in transit across its disk.
FIVE
The ship swung “downward,” cutting across the ecliptic plane to seek out the orbit of the fourth of the golden star’s eleven worlds. Assuming an observation orbit five hundred fifty miles above the planet, the XV-ftl zipped round four times before spying the alien settlement. It lay in the shadowed nightside of the planet. The encroaching path of brightness, peeling the night away from the turning planet, told that the alien settlement was not many hours from dawn. In the rear cabin, Martin Bernard and his fellow negotiators lay strapped in, shielded against the atmospheric buffeting of landing, waiting the minutes out as the XV-ftl dropped in ever-narrowing spirals toward the darkness below. Bernard felt strangely helpless as the ship coiled through its landing orbit. Here I am, he thought, trussed into a mattress like a child in the womb waiting to be born. And no more capable of landing this ship than a child in the womb is of delivering himself and cutting the umbilicus.
Queasiness of the stomach assailed him. His life, all their lives, lay in the hands of five bloodshot, tired men. A miscalculation in somebody’s computations and they might smash into the unnamed planet below at fifty thousand miles a second. Or they might miss the planet altogether, have to come back and make another nervewracking pass at it.
Bernard swiveled his head backward until his eyes met Stone’s. The pudgy diplomat’s face was pale and glossy with sweat. But he managed to grin.
“I don’t go much for this spaceship travel,” Bernard said. “How about you?”
“Give me transmat every time,” Stone murmured. “But we can’t very well be choosy this trip, eh?”
“Guess not,” Bernard admitted. “No choice of accomodations for us.”
He fell silent again, reminded once again of how little scope for free action a human being really had. The dully deterministic fact had been hammered home to him in his undergraduate days, when he had first encountered the damnably unanswerable set of sociometric equations that covered most of man’s traits and behavior patterns. There’s hardly any choice. We’re prisoners of—well, call it necessity for lack of a neater term. The only choices we get are low-level ones; and maybe we aren’t even really choosing then.
The ship jounced down through the atmosphere. It was a bumpy drop; Bernard was grateful for the cradle he nestled in. He had never realized that spaceship travel was as crude and as clumsy as this. A transmat trip was clean, sharp, like the blade of a microtome: you stepped in, you stepped out, and you were there. None of this tiresome business of acceleration and deceleration, matching velocities, actions-and-equal-but-opposite reactions.
He smiled, thinking how little he actually knew about the physics of space travel. He, who had spent his honeymoon on a green pleasure-world in the Sirius system, who had vacationed on planets orbiting Beta Centauri and Bellatrix and Eta Ursae Majoris, was hazier on the Newtonian facts of life than most schoolboys building their first model rockets. Blame it on the transmat, he thought. No one cared how a rocketship worked when he could step through cool green flame and exit four hundred light-years from home.
Bernard eyed the planet growing in the viewscreen. They were too close to regard it as a sphere, now; it had flattened tremendously, and nearly a third of its area was outside the screen’s subtended angle of vision.
As the XV-ftl whirled past dayside, Bernard caught glimpses of great continents lying in a blue-green sea like slabs of meat against a table. All was motionless, even the fleecy wisps of cloud far below, the dark blotch of a raging storm. Then they were plunged into night, and only indistinct shapes could be seen.
Emerging into dayside again, now the bright threads of the bigger rivers could be picked out. One vast waterway seemed to travel diagonally across the biggest continent, cutting a channel from northeast to southwest and proliferating into hundreds of smaller streams. Mountain ranges rose like buckled humps in the far west and north. Most of the continent was a verdant green, shading into a darker color toward the north and in the highlands.
Closing his eyes, Bernard choked back his dizziness and waited for the moment of landing.
It came some time later; he realized he had dozed, an after-effect of the deceleration pills Nakamura had handed out at the last meal. But he woke suddenly, as if having a premonition of arrival, and, moments afterward, he sensed a gentle thump. That was all.
It had been a perfect landing.
The voice of Laurance came over the intercabin speaker: “We’ve made our landing without trouble. Our landing-point is some ten or twelve miles east of the alien settlement. The sun is due to rise here in about an hour. We’ll be leaving the ship as soon as routine area decontamination is carried out.”
The routine decontamination took only a few minutes. Then, once all radiation products incident to the landing had been sluiced away, the hatch slid open and the air of another world came filtering into the ship.
He stood at the lip of the hatch now, testing the air. It was much like Earth’s; but there was a fraction more of oxygen in it, not enough of an overplus to jeopardize health but just enough to give the air a rich, heady quality. It was almost like breathing fine white wine. He felt, after a few inhalations, a confidence that had deserted him in the dark hours just before landing.
“Let’s go, Dr. Bernard,” Peterszoon called to him from below. “We can’t wait all day.”
“Sorry,” Bernard said. He reddened and hastily clambered down the catwalk to the ground. The five crewmen were there already. Stone, Dominici, and Havig followed.