The World Swappers Read online

  “Now look here,” said Bassett, “we ourselves haven’t had a chance to evaluate our findings yet. You, and whoever else is behind you, can’t conceivably have had an advance report. To start with, this is one of the fastest civil ships in space, and I doubt whether anyone in your group, whoever they may be, has access to a Metchnikov driver.”

  “True,” conceded Counce, not mentioning that they got along excellently without needing Metchnikov drivers.

  The implied tribute to his deductive ability touched Bassett’s perfectly human vanity. He said, “You know, I’ve heard stories from time to time, which seemed incredible but made me keep my eyes open. You might say, I guess, that I’d been watching out for you.”

  “Whereas I was waiting for you,” Counce reminded him. He drew the knife of his words deep, and gave the wound a chance to fester in Bassett’s self-esteem before continuing.

  “Your greatest difficulty is that you don’t know what your problem really is.”

  “Indeed!” snapped Bassett. “And by what right do you claim to know better than I?”

  “Suppose we say,” Counce murmured, “that my friends and I have studied the matter for a longer time than you have. But that’s beside the point. I’m going to tell you straight out that the solution to the problem is not to be found on Boreas, but on Ymir. Having done that, I’ll give you two alternatives. You can decide that you want me to tackle the Ymiran problem for you and bring you the answer, in which case you can buy time on the Falconetta program over Video India–no special message, it’ll be conspicuous enough. I know you never patronize the show with your advertising; you don’t like the limits Ram Singh puts on the use of hypnotics. Word will get to me. Alternatively, you can turn me over the side and forget about me.”

  He raised a hand to forestall a question budding on Bassett’s lips. “There isn’t a third alternative,” he said. “You won’t crack the Ymiran problem by yourself. It’ll be tough for me, and I’m a specialist in problems.”

  “You’re good at setting them, certainly,” acknowledged Bassett. “But I’m not totally unpracticed myself, of course. I presume your mind is very well armored indeed, or you’d never have ventured here alone. That implies there’s no quick way I could dig the knowledge you claim to possess out of your mind. But I’m patient enough to resort to a long, slow way if I have to.”

  The threat wasn’t even a veiled one. Counce got to his feet and stared down at the other across the transparent table. “I said there was no third choice, Bassett,” he snapped. “Check your detector board. There’s a Dateline Fisheries sub cruising in a tight circle round the limits of your barrier. Bear in mind that a genuine fishguard’s sub wouldn’t know there was a ship here. You’d be well advised to let me swim out to it.”

  “Is that true?” Bassett asked the air; well, it was only to be expected that he’d have eavesdroppers on such an important conversation.

  “Yes,” answered a voice from the ceiling. “But what the hell could a sub do to us behind our screens? Suppose we jump a couple of miles!”

  “I shouldn’t,” said Counce, a hint of amusement edging his tone.

  According to their psych-profile of him, Bassett ought to have been sufficiently fuddled by the strangeness of Counce’s arrival to have failed to see the obvious: that there was nothing a sub could do to them behind so much screening. Counce could feel the tension mounting inside him.

  “I think you’ve been rather stupid,” said Bassett at last. “Yes, Lecoq, by all means jump a couple of miles.”

  Counce sighed, and stubbed his cigarillo.

  “And send a couple of men in here,” Bassett ordered.

  They entered; they were large and muscular and determined, and when Bassett nodded at Counce they closed in, intending to take him prisoner. Apologetically Counce struck each of them under the jaw with enough force to render them unconscious; he hit the one on the left with slightly too much violence, and blood dribbled from the site of a tooth as the man fell.

  “Lecoq!” shouted Bassett, leaping to his feet.

  “I’m putting the ship in orbit,” said the voice from the ceiling. “I daren’t turn loose a gun in there!”

  Trembling all over, Bassett backed as far away from Counce as he could–about four feet.

  “I told you there was no third alternative,” said Counce again, sharply this time, managing to convey that he felt he was dealing with a backward child.

  And in his turn, he disappeared.

  CHAPTER III

  There were more than fifty people working around the excavation, and yet never in his young life had Anty Dreean felt so completely alone. Beyond the harsh brilliance of the arc lights the alien stars of Regis’ sky shone jewel-bright, jewel-hard, out of the polar night. His breath, and that of all the other men and women present, misted whitely as they exhaled; they clapped their hands and stamped their feet in spite of the encumbering parkas and fur breeches they wore.

  He stood at the control panel of the lighting system, alert to answer any calls for increased brilliance in the pit before him. This pit was a hundred feet long and perhaps twenty feet wide at its widest. Moving methodically along its floor, carrying sensitive detection instruments, were half a dozen men and women. Occasionally they broke the pattern of their coming and going to claw loose some promisingly hard lump from the frozen soil, crumble it, examine the result, and throw it aside before resuming their task.

  An intruder might have guessed at an archeological survey in progress. The guess would have been more than half wrong. For this was Regis, loneliest outpost of the human race, further from Earth than any other planet men had ever visited, and people had come here so lately and in such small numbers that nothing extracted from the ground would have said anything significant about their doings.

  Yet the guess would have been at least partly right, too. The technique was similar to archeological excavation; the painstaking thoroughness was identical. But the searchers were not after anything as neutral as knowledge for its own sake–they were desperately seeking a warning of danger. A danger that might be the greatest the human race had ever faced.

  In spite of his awareness of the consequences, Anty Dreean found himself wishing that the waiting might end and that they might find the certainty they feared.

  At the end of the pit nearest to where Anty stood, Wu, the director of the expedition on Regis, and his senior aide, Katya Ivanovna, moved like grotesque, oversized dolls. In Wu’s hands was a sonar detector; its staring telltale eye flickered and changed as its beam recorded the presence of solid matter in the walls of the pit, and Katya dug at it with a trowel. Anty leaned forward, wondering if this was going to be it.

  Abruptly, he was recalled to his task by a sharp command–the voice had probably been Lotus Scharf’s. He stepped up the level of illumination at the opposite end of the pit, and people all around, as though moved by a premonition, hesitated and turned to see what had happened.

  Something glittered in Lotus’ gauntleted hands. She beckoned urgently to Wu, who hurried across to her. For a few moments their hooded heads were bent together as they conferred.

  From the rim of the excavation someone uttered the question which had been burning for long moments in Anty’s own mind; he strained forward to hear the answer.

  A little stiffly, a little solemnly, Wu raised his head and spoke. “It’s a food container,” he said. “An empty can–and it’s not one of ours.”

  So the Others had been to Regis. And that meant they might come back.

  The gathering began to break up; someone went over to the transfax and started it, so that the leakage of light from its tremendous field of pent-up power made the landscape like day. Wu handed his sonar detector over the edge of the pit, and scrambled up after it, as did the rest of the workers. Only Anty Dreean seemed to be frozen to immobility.

  In the few seconds it took for Wu and his companions to leave the pit, Anty found time to review the whole series of events that had climaxed he
re, now, on the permafrozen tundra of Regis’ north pole. It had begun a very long way away, on Wu’s home world of K’ung-fu-tse, when a laboratory worker engaged in measuring certain atomic resonance frequencies had found his results to be disturbed by vibrations in the very fabric of space.

  There were thousands of sets of vibrations such as these now, spreading through the galaxy like the wake of so many ships. That was exactly what they were–the wake of ships, driven faster than light, and straining the framework of the universe. They could be ignored, of course; they produced no noticeable effects on anything at a distance greater than a few thousand miles. Except when it came to such delicate operations as studying the interior of atomic nuclei.

  There was a standard technique for dealing with the problem, tedious, but adequate, which consisted of determining the source of the vibrations to a high degree of accuracy and then calculating what allowance to make for their influence. Swearing, the laboratory worker proceeded to apply the method–and found that the source was in the wrong place.

  It lay out towards Regis. And because he happened–by a minor miracle–to be a friend of Wu’s and party to a good many secrets which most people did not share, the worker felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  There should not have been any vibrations of this kind in the neighborhood of Regis. No human-built ship had ever been to Regis. Men had visited the planet, true, but they had traveled by a different route.

  So he had shouted a warning.

  They had known for a very long time that the laws of chance alone insisted that man was not unique in the cosmos; somewhere there must be other creatures with an urge towards the stars and the technical ability to fulfill that urge. For a shorter time, they had known what the nearest non-human space-going species was, and where it held sway. That was why men had come to Regis, a world ideally situated as a base from which to keep an eye on their potential competitors.

  But now–!

  The Others had been to Regis already. What if they were to come back? Much of this world’s surface was temperate and therefore too warm for their comfort; here at the pole the climate was quite suitable, though–and even if the prevailing planetary average made it unlikely they would decide to plant a colony here, there was always a risk. Look at what men had done on Ymir, that icebox of a world!

  Anty felt a chill that was not all due to his environment.

  Slowly, he returned to the reality around him, and heard his name being called. They had cut off the power from the floodlights, and were now working by the leakage from the transfax field; its glare shifted irregularly from white to green and back, and when it was in the green phase everything looked ghastly. Someone was waving to him from beside the transfax platform. Katya.

  Dutifully, but despondently, Anty answered the call.

  “Anty, I hate doing this to you,” Katya said as he came within earshot. “Only there doesn’t seem to be much choice. I’m going to ask you to stay behind here for a bit longer and see what else you can turn up that the Others left behind. We’ve got some really high-pressure planning to do.”

  “And you can get on with it better if I’m not in the way,” Anty said with acid sarcasm. “What do you want the rest of that garbage for? Isn’t simple proof enough for you?”

  Katya’s broad Slavonic face reflected momentary indecision; then she put one enormously bulky arm companionably around Anty’s shoulders. “Anty, honey, I know how you feel, believe me. But what can we do about it, except our best? We aren’t trying to shuffle you off out of the way; it’s just that we need every scrap of information we can get out of this hole here. How big the visitors’ expedition was; how it was equipped–get me?”

  Anty took a deep breath and mastered himself. “I’m sorry, Katya. It’s–well, it’s everything put together, I guess. Being the newest recruit here on Regis, and being practically the only non-Earthborn person–”

  Katya made to say somehing, but Anty rushed on. “Yes, I know what you’re going to say. All of us have to go through the experience of being Johnny-comelately, and there are so many more people on Earth than on all the other worlds put together that it’s only natural for me to be on my own, and that with my lack of experience I can be more valuable doing the dirty work than helping to draft policy–I know, blast it! I simply can’t make myself compute with it all the time.”

  Katya gave him a broad grin. “You’ve won half your battle already, Anty. It takes some people an awfully long time to learn to make frank admissions like that one! But there’s another thing you ought to get through your head, and if you get that straight as well, you’ll be fully equipped.”

  Anty nodded, his eyes on Katyas face.

  “The human mind, Anty–and remember, ‘human’ includes you–just isn’t fitted to live with the certainty of impending disaster twenty-four hours a day. You have to have some sort of relief, or you’ll break down. Laugh! Sing! Let yourself go!”

  “Laugh?” echoed Anty sourly. “What at?”

  “Look for something. The expression on Counce’s face, for example–can’t you picture him when he hears that his carefully worked out plans for handling Bassett will have to be chopped to pieces?”

  “You call that funny? I’d have said it was a shame!”

  Katya shrugged. “It’s part of the universe-as-it-is. To give you a clearer example: half an hour ago we didn’t know that the Others had been to Regis. We know now. You’re thinking of it as a disaster. But damnation, it isn’t! The disaster would have been if we hadn’t found out; the actual discovery is a relief.”

  Anty turned it over in his mind, and at length gave a reluctant nod. Katya clapped him on the back approvingly.

  “Lotus is staying here for the time being too,” she said. “We’d spare more people if we could, because we desperately need to find out what’s down that hole. But we can’t, so it’s up to you and her.”

  Again Anty nodded, and with a parting smile Katya turned and climbed through the transfax back to Main Base.

  Practically everything else had gone by now; all the time he had been talking with Katya the others had been manhandling the equipment up the ramp to the transfax platform, and he was startled to see that there was now nothing left except two shovels, one large floodlight, and Lotus herself. She was offering him one of the shovels.

  “Shall we get busy?” she suggested in her dry, precise voice. “The quicker we get started, the quicker we can get the hell out.”

  Anty nodded, accepted the shovel, and jumped down into the pit. Digging! Actually pushing this hard ground aside with his own strength! He might as well have stayed home on Boreas and lived a nice comfortable life without knowing about the transfax, and the existence of the Others, and the hundred and one other uncomfortable secrets to which he had been initiated since he’d come to Regis.

  The transfax went off, and night returned to the area. Glancing about him, Anty was struck by the sterile ugliness of the scene. Yet to the alien visitors who had come here the landscape would not have been repulsive; to them, this bare ground layered with frost and patched with snowdrifts would have been familiar–perhaps beautiful.

  He tried to imagine the view through alien eyes. There would have been their ship; they would have scouted the planet and found it uninhabited except by the blobs of primal protoplasm in its soupy seas; then, secure, they would have chosen the most comfortable spot for a landing, camped here, and gone about their business.

  When they were done, they would have buried their garbage and sterilized the local soil for fear of contaminating it with their own symbiotic microorganisms. And they would have gone away. Perhaps they would never return. There were more worlds that men had considered and discarded than there were worlds where they had planted colonies.

  His shovel chinked against something, and he turned out the first alien artifact he had ever held in his own hands. Awe filled him as he picked it up and looked at it. It was no more than a broken cathode-ray tube, shattered perhaps
by careless handling. But it had been conceived in an alien mind, and that was what counted.

  Anty’s misery evaporated like frost in sunlight. This useless piece of scrap he held was recognizable, but it was different. How to communicate the excitement that difference inspired in him? There was the problem in a nutshell: how to make people find differences like this exciting, and not frightening. It could be done, couldn’t it? It would have to be done.

  CHAPTER IV

  The interior of the submersible–which was in fact a perfectly ordinary fishguard’s craft belonging to Dateline Fisheries and unofficially borrowed for the occasion–was very crowded. Half the available space was taken up by the transfax platform; the robot mechanic supervising its operation blocked off access to the dolphin kennel, and the rest of the cabin was nearly completely filled by Ram Singh and his flowing white beard, and by Falconetta, looking as usual quite dishearteningly beautiful.

  When Counce arrived, therefore, he perforce remained on the transfax platform. At first he said nothing. There was no sound except the burr of the propulsor and the hum of the ventilation fans as they dealt with the heat generated by operating the transfax field.

  During the pregnant silence, he removed from the belt of his shorts the neatly packaged video-audio unit which had kept the others apprised of his doings. It consisted of a flexible strip of plastic covered with printed circuitry and ostensibly decorated with twin multifaceted bosses on either side of the fastening. Bassett had dismissed it without a second thought. That was about the only thing that had gone exactly according to plan.