There was no doubt about it. The commander and crew were as nervous as he was. He edged the ship forward as the rift appeared, and abruptly the great ship was moving deep into the Maze.
It was a slow passage, requiring three complete orbits of Asteroid Central. Ben watched closely as the gaps in the pattern appeared, allowing him to nose the ship in closer and then closer again. He concentrated on the ship’s controls, trying to clear his mind of other things. Even trouble in the Maze could be disastrous; if anything should happen to the Earth ship during the passage, the Earth commander would be convinced that Ben had personally sabotaged it. But slowly the great asteroid drew closer, until the surface was clearly visible on the view screen.
Confused activity was everywhere. Two of the main landing ports had opened and the great scanning telescopes were peering up at the approaching ship. Tiny figures of men could be seen manning the fixed missile tubes that flanked the ports like bristling whiskers. Ben could identify the stepwise makeready for attack going on even following the movements at this distance.
Behind him the Earth commander walked to the intercom. “All right, men,” he said. “Battle stations.
Man every gun and make ready.”
The men moved swiftly; one by one the battle stations reported themselves manned and ready. Ben hit the controls sharply, veering the ship out of collision course with a vagrant asteroid fragment and then ducking down into a larger gap that was opening up. Only a few more to go, he thought, and it’s up to them.
“Load tubes one and two,” the Earth commander said. Ben felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck, but he kept his attention glued to the controls. Of course they’re afraid, he kept telling himself.
They’ve got to be ready, in case the silly fools down there open up on them. He moved the ship into the last gap in the Maze before it could break free for a landing pattern. Suddenly, it was hard for him to breathe. Sweat stood out on his forehead, and beside him he saw Tom Barron gripping the shock bar until his knuckles were white. Another shift, and the ship was free of the Maze.
“Take it down,” the Earth commander said. Below them the great asteroid loomed large, the main landing port gaping open like the jaws of a fantastic monster. There was utter silence in the ship’s cabin now; no one was breathing as Ben threw switches and dropped the nose of the cruiser down for the landing port.
At last, miraculously, the ship was down. There was a whir of grappling cables. Ben killed the power and sat back. Nothing happened.
He heard a tense breath expelled behind him, and the Earth commander said, “Now take me in.” Flanked by Ben Trefon and Tom Barron, the Earthman marched up the ramp into the Spacer stronghold. The ramp was lined with Spacers standing with hand weapons ready, their faces tense, their eyes alert for any false move. Passing between them, Ben led the way down the corridor and into the meeting room where he and the Barrons had made their final plans with the mauki.
The Spacer commander and the mauki were waiting, and there was something of wonder on the commander’s face as he saw his Earth-born counterpart stop short, salute him, and turn to the woman with a stiff formal bow.
“It is our understanding,” the Earth commander said, “that this woman has a message of importance for us all to hear. We have agreed to suspend hostilities until that message has been heard, providing you also cease your fire and control your fleet.”
The Spacer commander nodded slowly, staring at Ben as if he could not believe his ears. “You have our pledge.”
“Then we request that the woman return with us,” the Earthman said. “In return for that concession, we will break our scrambler screen so that your people as well as ours can hear the message.” Once again the Spacer commander nodded. “It is so agreed.”
Without another word, the Earth commander turned to the mauki. He took her arm in an oddly gentlemanly gesture, nodded to Ben and Tom, and turned back toward the Earth ship.
An hour later they returned through the Maze to the Earth command ship. Ten minutes after that the harsh static of the radio scramblers suddenly ceased, and a message went out from Asteroid Central to the outlying fleet ordering Tommy Whisk to stand by without action until further orders.
The message had hardly been acknowledged when silence fell in every Spacer shop and concourse, on every Earth ship, and in all the relay stations that were alerted to pick up the message and carry it back across the millions of miles of space to the powerful receivers on Earth herself.
And then, at last, the mauki began to sing.
Epilogue
OF ALL THE stories in Earth’s long history probably none was so strange, and none destined to be retold so often and in so many versions as the story of the woman’s voice that had ended the Earth-Spacer war and brought to a close the centuries of bitterness between men of the planet and men who dwelt in the outer reaches of the solar system.
Some said the woman sang in English, and others said in Russian. Some said she sang in the native dialect of the Indians of Mexico, or of the Greenland Eskimos; others insisted that her chant had been in the language of the Orient or of the great African nations. But whatever the language, there was agreement on one thing: that of all who heard her sing (and perhaps no message had ever been heard by so many people in so many places at the same time) not one had failed to understand the message she was conveying.
Later, of course, the words were written down in sundry languages for everyone to read and ponder and—ultimately—to understand. It was a story that touched everyone who heard it, for it was a story of the planet Earth, and of the exasperating race of intelligent people who had grown up on her surface, a race of curious and powerful creatures, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, groping through the centuries to learn how to use the intelligence they possessed. It was a story of enormous accomplishment and of enormous failure.
The mauki’s song told the story of the history of those men, sometimes weak, sometimes powerful, sometimes ambitious, sometimes lazy, sometimes subjecting themselves to tyrannical rulers and evil causes, but always ultimately throwing off the yoke in a fierce and relentless independence, always reaching upward and upward with the intelligence of their birthright. She sang of the march of kings and Caesars, of revolutions against tyranny and of the free societies that rose from the ashes of those revolutions. Through her song ran a relentless theme: the driving struggle between good and evil that men had always been engaged in, the struggle between freedom and slavery.
Her song recounted events of history that had long been forgotten as she led her listeners step by step through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, through the great wars of the twentieth century and the rising tide of scientific advances that took men into space. Finally she sang of the mortal struggle that had arisen out of the Spacer conspiracy and now had reached its climax in this present war between Earthmen and Spacers.
And then the mauki sang of the future. In measured strains that could not be mistaken she sang of the crooked road that men had followed since the exile of the Spacers had begun and the direction in which it inevitably led: to certain destruction, to the crippling of the race and the wasting of its intelligence, perhaps to obliteration of life on the planet altogether. But she sang of another future that could be, in which men had ceased fighting each other and turned their energies toward the enormous achievements of which they were capable. No one who heard her could mistake the message of the Searchers which she passed on—the grim warning on the one hand, the promise of greatness on the other. As the last words of the mauki’s chant faded into silence, there was no one who heard her who could question the alternative to be chosen.