SHIP OF STRANGERS
Bob Shaw
The untented Kosmos my abode,
I pass, a wilful stranger;
My mistress still the open road,
And the bright eyes of danger.
— R. L. Stevenson
CHAPTER ONE
Candar waited seven thousand years before he saw his second spaceship.
He had been little more than a cub when he saw the first, but the images of that event were still bright and sharp in his memory. It had been a warm, moist morning and his mother and father had just begun cutting through a village of the two-legged food creatures. Candar was quietly watching their great grey bodies at work when his long-range senses warned him he was being approached by something very large, something which was outside all his previous experience. He raised his head, alarmed, but his parents—their perceptions swamped by the abundance of red-reeking food—remained unaware of the menace until it came into view.
It was not until after the big ship had passed overhead that the awful sound of it came hammering down, levelling the food creatures’ flimsy huts even more efficiently than mother and father could have done. The ship banked sharply, halted high in the morning air, and suddenly Candar and his parents were lifted into the sky. Candar found that he was caught in some kind of force net. He measured its shifting frequencies, wave lengths, intensity gradients, and even discovered that his brain could produce a similar field of its own—but he could not break free of the invisible constraints which had clamped around his body.
He and his parents were swept upwards to where the sky turned black and Candar could hear the stars. The sun rapidly grew larger and then, some time later, his mother and father were released. They dwindled out of sight in a few seconds and Candar, already adapting to the strange new environment, deduced that they had been steered into a course which terminated in the sun’s bright furnace. Judging by their frantic struggles as they shrank into the distance, his mother and father had performed the same calculation.
Candar dismissed them from his thoughts and tried to anticipate his own fate. There were many sentient beings within the ship, with life-glows not greatly different from those of the food creatures, but they were too remote and too well screened for him to exert any influence on their actions. He ceased the futile twisting and flailing of his body as the sun began to grow smaller. As it became just another star, and eventually faded away altogether, time ceased to have any meaning for Candar.
He remained quiescent until he perceived that a double star was brightening and apparently expelling all others from its vicinity. It blossomed and became two egg-shaped suns courting each other in binary ritual. The ship located a planet of black rock which wobbled in a precarious and highly elliptical orbit between the suns. There, far above the barren surface, it released Candar from its grip. Only by converting his body into skeins of organic rope did he survive the fall. And by the time he had reformed his sense organs the ship was gone.
Candar knew that he had been imprisoned. He also knew that on this world which could carry no trace of food he would eventually die, and there was nothing he could do but wait for that unthinkable event to take place.
His new world made its painful run between the two suns every year. Each time it did so the black rock melted and flowed like mud, and nothing survived unchanged except Candar.
And it was seven thousand years before he saw his second spaceship.
The thing Dave Surgenor detested most about high-gravity planets was the speed at which beads of sweat could move. A trickle of perspiration could form on the brow and, with a rush like that of an attacking insect, be down the side of his face and under his collar before he could raise a hand to defend himself. In his sixteen years of survey work he had never become used to it.
“If this wasn’t my last trip,” Surgenor said quietly, dabbing his neck, “I’d refuse to do any more.”
“Can I have time to think about the logic of that one?” Victor Voysey, who was on his second mapping expedition, kept his eyes on the survey module’s controls. The forward view plate, as it had done for days, showed nothing more than ripple patterns of sterile igneous rock unfolding before the vehicle’s headlight, but Voysey stared at it like a tourist on an exotic pleasure cruise.
“You’ve got time to think about it,” Surgenor said. “That’s what you get most of in this job—time to sit on your backside and twiddle your thumbs and think about things. Mainly you try to think of some reason for not quitting the job the first chance you get—and that’s a nice exercise in ingenuity.”
“Money.” Voysey was trying to sound cynical. “That’s why everybody signs on. And stays on.”
“It isn’t worth it.”
“I’ll agree with you when I’ve made a bundle like yours.”
Surgenor shook his head. “You’re making a terrible mistake, Victor. You’re trading your life—the only one they issue you with—for money, for the privilege of altering the positions of a few electrons in a credit computer, and it’s a bad deal, Victor. No matter how much money you make you’ll never be able to buy this time back again.”
“The trouble with you, Dave, is that you’re getting…’ Voysey hesitated and tried to wrestle the sentence on to a new track “…getting that you can’t remember what it’s like to need money.”
Getting old, Surgenor concluded on his partner’s behalf, and decided to talk about something else.
“I’ll make you a side bet, ten creds to your single, that we see the ship from the top of this rise.”
“Already!” Voysey, ignoring the proposed wager, leaned forward and started tapping buttons on the range finder panel.
Surgenor, smiling a little at the younger man’s excitement, rearranged his limbs on the cushioned seat and tried to make himself comfortable. It seemed like centuries since the mother ship had set its six survey modules down at the black planet’s south pole and then had ghosted back into the sky to do a half circuit and land at the north pole. The ship would have completed the journey in less than an hour—the men in the modules had had to sweat it out under three gravities for twelve days as their machines zigzagged along the planet’s surface. Had there been an atmosphere they could have switched to ground-effect suspension and travelled twice as fast, but this planet—one of the least hospitable Surgenor had ever seen—made no concessions of any kind to unwanted visitors.
The survey module reached the top of the crest and the horizon, which was the line separating starry blackness from dead blackness, dropped away in front. Surgenor saw the clustered lights of the mother ship, the Sarafand, down on the plain about ten kilometres from him.
“You were right, Dave,” Voysey said, and Surgenor repressed a grin at the note of respect in his voice. “I think we’re going to be first back, too. I don’t see any other lights.”
Surgenor nodded as he scanned the pool of night, looking for the wandering glow-worms which would have represented other returning vehicles. Strictly speaking, all six modules should have been exactly the same distance out from the Sarafand in their respective directions, ranged in a perfect circle. During the greater part of the journey the vehicles had adhered rigidly to the survey pattern so that the data they were transmitting to the mother ship always reached it from six equally distant, equally spaced points. Any deviation from the pattern would have caused distortions in the planetary maps being built in the ship’s computer deck. But each module had a minimum awareness radius of five hundred kilometres, with the result that when they got to within that distance of the mother ship the remaining territory had already been mapped six times over, and the job was well and truly finished. It was an unofficial tradition that the last five-hundred-kilometre leg of a survey was an out-and-out race for home, with champagne for the winners and appropriate salary deductions for the others.