The Complete Short Stories: The 1950s. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ others were drifting interestedly around the control room, high in the nose.

      ‘Come and look at the valley!’ invited Little Light, pointing out at the spread of bright land which shone all around them. From here, too, they could see a wide river, briefly shorn of ice and sparkling full of spawning fish.

      ‘It’s beautiful,’ Calurmo said simply.

      ‘We have indeed discovered a strange object,’ remarked the Preacher, stroking a great upholstered seat. ‘How old do you think it all is? It has the feel of great age.’

      ‘I can tell you how long it has stood here,’ said Woebee. ‘The door through which we entered was open for the snow to drift in. When the snow melts it can never run away. I scanned it, and the earliest drops of it fell from the sky twelve thousand seasons ago.’

      ‘What? Three thousand years?’ exclaimed Aprit.

      ‘No. Four thousand years – you know I don’t count winter as a season.’

      A line of geese broke V-formation to avoid the nose of the ship, and joined faultlessly again on the other side. Aprit caught their military thoughts as they sailed by.

      ‘We should have come up this way more often,’ said Calurmo regretfully, gazing at his sorrel. The tiny flowers were so very beautiful.

      The next thing to decide was what they had discovered. Accordingly, they walked slowly around the control room, registering in unison, blithely unaware of the upper-level reasoning that lay behind their almost instinctive act. It took them five minutes, five minutes after starting completely from scratch; for the ship represented a fragment of a technology absolutely unknown to them. Also, it was a deep-spacer, which meant a corresponding complexity in drive, accommodation and equipment; but the particular pattern of its controls – repeated only in a few ships of its own class – designated unfailingly the functions and intentions of the vessel. At least, it did to Calurmo and party, as easily as one may distinguish certain features of a hand from finding a lost glove.

      Little surprise was wasted on the concept of a spaceship. As Aprit remarked, they had their own less cumbrous methods of covering interplanetary distances. But several other inferences fascinated them.

      ‘Light is the fastest thing in our universe and the slowest in the dimension through which this ship travels,’ said Woebee. ‘It was made by a clever race.’

      ‘It was made by a race incapable of carrying power in their own bodies,’ said Little Light.

      ‘Nor could they orient very efficiently,’ the Preacher added, indicating the astro-navigational equipment.

      ‘So there are planets attending other stars,’ said Calurmo thoughtfully, his mind probing the possibilities.

      ‘And sensible creatures on those planets,’ said Aprit.

      ‘Not sensible creatures,’ said Little Light, pointing to the gunnery cockpit with its banks of switches. ‘Those are to control destruction.’

      ‘All creatures have some sense,’ said the Preacher.

      They switched on. The old ship seemed to creak and shudder, as if it had experienced too much time and snow ever to move again.

      ‘It was content enough without stars,’ muttered Woebee.

      ‘Rain water must have got into the hydrogen,’ Aprit said.

      ‘It’s a very funny machine indeed to have made,’ said the Preacher sternly. ‘I don’t wonder someone went away and left it.’

      The boredom of manual control was not for them; they triggered the necessary impulses directly to the motors. Below them, the splendid plain tilted and shrunk to a green penny set between the white and blue of land and sea. The edge of the ocean curved and with a breath-catching distortion became merely a segment of a great ball dwindling far beneath. The further they got, the brighter it shone.

      ‘Most noble view,’ commented the Preacher.

      Aprit was not looking. He had climbed into the computer and was feeding one of his senses along the relays and circuits of the memory bank and inference sector. He clucked happily as data drained to him. When he had it all he spat it back and returned to the others.

      ‘Very ingenious,’ he said, explaining it. ‘But built by a race of behaviourists. Their souls were obviously trapped by their actions, consequently their science was trapped by their beliefs; they did not know where to look for real progress.’

      ‘It’s very noisy, isn’t it?’ remarked the Preacher, as if producing a point that confirmed what had just been said.

      ‘That noise should not be,’ said Calurmo coolly. ‘It is an alarm bell, and indicates something is wrong.’

      The sound played about them unceasingly until Aprit cut it off.

      ‘I expect we are doing something wrong,’ he sighed. ‘I’ll go and see what it is. But why make the bell ring here, and not where the trouble is?’

      As Aprit left the control room, Little Light pointed into the huge celestial globe in which the stars of the galaxy were embalmed like diamonds in amber. ‘Let’s go there,’ he suggested, rattling the calibrations until a tangential course lit up between Earth and a cluster of worlds in the center of the galaxy. ‘I’m sure it will be lovely there. I wonder if sorrel will grow in those parts; it won’t grow on Venus, you know.’

      While he spoke he spun the course integrator dial, read off the specifications of flight, and fed the co-ordinates as efficiently into the computer as if he had just undergone a training course.

      Aprit returned smiling.

      ‘I’ve fixed it,’ he said. ‘Silly of us. We left the door open when we came in – there wasn’t any air in here. That was why the bell was ringing.’

      They were picked up on Second Empire screens about two parsecs from the outpost system of Kyla. An alert-beetle pinpointed them and flashed their description simultaneously to Main Base on Kyla I and half a dozen other interested points – a term including the needle fleet hovering two light-years out from Kyla system.

      Main Base to GOC Pointer, Needle Fleet 305A: Unidentified craft, mass 40,000 tons, proceeding outskirts system toward galaxy centre. Estimated speed, 20 SLU. Will you intercept?

      GOC Pointer to Main Base, Kyla I: Am already on job.

      Main Base to GOC Pointer: Alien acknowledges no signals, despite calls on all systems.

      Pointer to Main Base: Quiet type. Appears to be heading from region Omega Y76 W592. Is this correct?

      Main Base to Pointer: Correct.

      Pointer to Main Base: Earth?

      Main Base to Pointer: Looks like it.

      Pointer to Main Base: Standing by for trouble.

      Main Base to Pointer: Could be enemy stratagem, of course.

      Pointer to Main Base: Of course. Going in. Out.

      Officer Commanding СКАЧАТЬ