Part One
Doomship
1
The place was called Sun One. It had begun as an asteroid, circling a young blue-white giant in the great dense cloud called the Orion Nebula. Over centuries it had been built upon, sheathed and tunnelled; and what it had become was the closest thing there was to a central headquarters of the loose association of intelligent races in the Galaxy that had made contact with one another.
In one of the inner shells two members of a very junior race were meeting. They came from Earth. They loved each other. They were young. They planned to marry. All these things made them curiosities to the races which possessed personal curiosity, and they were widely watched, heard or sensed as they came towards each other. They didn't mind. Ben Charles Pertin saw the girl and launched himself in a shallow three-percent gravity dive over the heads of a thing like a dragon, a creature composed mostly of a single great blue eye and a couple of scurrying collective creatures from one of the core stars. 'Sorry,' he cried down at them, caught the laughing girl's hand and stopped hard beside her.
“Ouch,” she said, releasing a holdfast with her other hand. “I'd appreciate a little less enthusiasm next time.”
He kissed her and took her arm. “It's part of the image,” he said cheerfully. “You know what the chief of delegation says. Make them know we're here. Earth may be the newest planet in the association but it isn't going to be the least important. We have a duty to Earth to make ourselves known throughout the Galaxy, and a duty to the Galaxy to contribute our strength and our know-how.”
“I think,” said the girl, “that if you're going to talk like that you'd better buy me a drink.”
At this shell of Sun One the curvature of the spherical surface they walked on was noticeably sharp. They found it was easier to leap than to stroll. To travel arm in arm, which is how Ben Charles Pertin chose to walk with his girl, required practice and a lot of discomfort - not only to them but to the other sentients in the concourse. Pertin and Zara shifted grips, so that each had an arm around the other's waist; then Pertin caught the holdfast webbing with his free hand and partly tugged, partly kicked them into the air. They shot past the dragonlike creature, narrowly missed a steelwork vertical strut, touched down again next to something that looked like a soft-bodied beetle with three dozen legs and were in sight of the little refreshment plat-form they liked.
Pertin said “Hi!” to a thing like a green bat as it flapped by.
It hissed something shrill that his personal translator repeated into his ear as, “I recognize your identity, Ben Charles Pertin.” The girl nodded, too, although all members of that particular race, which was called the T'Worlie, looked alike to her, and in any event the T'Worlies did not have the custom of nodding since they had no more neck than bats.
As they waited for traffic to clear, the girl said, “How did your meeting go?”
“About as usual. Things are all fouled up on the probe.” He was watching a tumbling box-like robot that was coming towards them on a tangent, correcting its course with methodical jets of steam from the faces of its cubical body; but the tone of his voice made the girl look at him sharply.
“What is it, Ben?”
He gave her a caught-in-the-cookie-jar smile. “I'll tell you about it when we sit down.”
“You’ll tell me now.”
“Well—” He hesitated, then cried, “All right, we can make it now!” But the girl wrapped her fingers around the webbing of the holdfast.
“Ben!”
He relaxed and looked at her. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.
“Ben! Not again!”
He said defensively, “I have to, Zara. The other one’s dying.
There’s nobody from Earth on the probe now to represent us.
So I agreed to carry the ball.”
He looked appraisingly at the traffic of aliens, then back at her; then he looked at her with a sudden shock of surprise. The girl looked as if she had come very close to crying.
“Oh, Zara,” he said, half-touched and half-annoyed. “What are you making a big thing about? It’s nothing we haven’t done before.”
“I know," she said, and blinked hard. “It’s only - well, it’s sort of silly. But I hate the idea of your dying out there while we’re on our honeymoon.”
Pertin found that he was blinking himself; he was touched. He patted the girl’s hand and said seriously, “Honey, one of the traits I like best in you is that you’re not afraid to be sentimental at the right time. Don’t knock it. I love you for it. Now Let’s go get that drink.”
The little cafe was nearly empty. That was one of the things they liked about it. It had actual waiters, purchased people. They didn’t have much personality to display, but they were actually human, genetically speaking. Pertin and his fiancee enjoyed ordering in their rudimentary Italian - not their own language, to be sure, but at least a human language, and one for which they did not need the Pmal translators.
Pertin pulled his feet up, crossed them in the air and settled gently on to his chair. They looked about while waiting for their drinks to be brought. Pertin had been on Sun One for more than two years now, the girl for several months. Even so, familiarity had not dulled their interest in the place where they were stationed or in the work they did there. The girl was a news- writer, broadcasting to Earth every week on the stereo stage.
Pertin was an engineer. His job on Sun One didn’t involve much engineering. It did involve an interesting mixture of skills. He functioned partly as a sort of legalized spy and partly as a goodwill ambassador from Earth to the rest of the universe.
The mere fact that a job like this existed was still secretly thrilling to Ben Charles Pertin. He was not yet thirty. Even so, he was old enough to remember the time when the human race thought it was alone in the Galaxy.
Space travel itself was not new. The old “nations” had put up their chemical rockets and sent them chugging to Venus, Mars and the Moon in his grandfather’s time. They had looked for life, and come up empty every time. Nuclear probes a generation later investigated the outer planets, the satellites and even the asteroids, with the same result. No life. By the time Ben was twelve years old, the juice had run out of space travel.
There were still a lot of on-going projects, such as the close-orbiting satellites that photomapped the Earth and relayed TV programmes from Rangoon to Rochester and back. An occasional plodding probe was sent out to sample a comet’s gases or measure the solar flux. And of course there was always the Farside base on the Moon, where radio astronomy had retreated when the world’s communications systems had ruined reception for every ground-based dish. But no excitement was generated by any of that. There was not even any interest. If some pollster had sampled the Earth’s billions with a question like, “Do you think intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe?”, he would have been likely to receive as a general response, “Don’t know; don’t care.”
Then came Contact.
It happened just as Ben Pertin was turning thirteen. Something had been found on Pluto. An artifact, half-buried under Pluto’s mirror of ice. The Earth suddenly looked outward again. The stereo stages were full of it: the first fumbling attempts to patch it together, the first daring experiment at putting power through it. Everybody talked about it. Ben and his parents watched the glowing figures on their stage, enthralled. Their evening meals grew cold because they forgot to eat. In school, the kids made the discovery the main subject of every class.
And when the ancient communicator came to life and the first alien face peered out of its screen and looked into the face of a human from Earth, the world went mad.