Cray keeps surprisingly quiet but it is as well that the rest of the party start to trickle in about twenty minutes later the first arrivals remarking Oh _that"s_ where you"ve got to!
Presently we are all congregated at one end of the table as before, except that Mr. Yardo is now sitting between B and me; when M"Clare and the colonel come in he firmly stays where he is evidently considering himself One of Us now.
"The proposition," says M"Clare, "is that we intend to take _Gilgamesh_ to Incognita and land her there in such a way as to suggest that she crashed. In the absence of evidence to the contrary the Incognitans are bound to a.s.sume that that was her intended destination, and the presence of weapons, even disarmed, will suggest that her mission was aggressive. Firstly, can anyone suggest a better course of action? or does anyone object to this one?"
We all look at Lennie who sticks his hands in his pockets and mutters "No."
Kirsty gives her little cough and says there is a point which has not been mentioned.
If a heavily-armed ship crashes on Incognita, will not the government of the hemisphere in which it crashes be presented with new ideas for offensive weapons? And won"t this make it _more_ likely that they will start aggression? And won"t the fear of this make the other hemisphere even more likely to try and get in first before the new weapons are complete?
h.e.l.l, I ought to have thought of that.
From the glance of unwilling respect which the colonel bestows on M"Clare it is plain these points have been dealt with.
"The weapons on Gilgamesh were disarmed when she was rediscovered," he says. "Essential sections were removed. The Incognitans won"t be able to reconstruct how they worked."
_Another_ fact for which we shall have to provide an explanation. Well how about this: The early explorers sent out by these people--the people in Gilgamesh ... oh, use Cray"s word and call them Lost Kafoozalum anyway their ships were armed, but they never found any enemies and the Idealists of B"s story refused even to carry arms any more.
(Which is just about what happened when the Terries set out to rediscover the colonies, after all.)
So the Lost Kafoozalum could not get rid of their weapons completely because it would have meant rebuilding the ship; so they just partially dismantled them.
Mr. Yardo suddenly chips in, "About that other point, girlie, surely there must be some neutral ground left on a half-occupied planet like that?" He beams round, pleased at being able to contribute.
B says, "The thing is," and stops.
We wait.
We have about given up hope when she resumes, "The thing is, it will have to be neutral ground of course, only that might easily become a thingummy ... I mean a, a _casus belli_ in itself. So the _other_ thing is it ought to be a place which is very hard to get at, so difficult that neither side can really get to it first, they"ll have to reach an agreement and co-operate."
"Yeah," says Dillie "that sounds fine, but what sort of place is that?"
I am sorting out in my head the relative merits of mountains, deserts, gorges, et cetera, when I an seized with inspiration at the same time as half the group; we say the same thing in different words and for a time there is Babel, then the idea emerges:
"Drop her into the sea!"
The colonel nods resignedly.
"Yes," he says, "that"s what we"re going to do."
He presses a b.u.t.ton and our projection-screens light up, first with a map of one pole of Incognita, expanding in scale till finally we are looking down on one little bit of coast on one of the polar islands. A glacier descends on to it from mountains inland and there is a bay between cliffs. Then we get a stereo scene of approximately the least hospitable of scenery I ever did see--except maybe when Parvati Lal Dutt"s brother made me climb up what he swore was the smallest peak in the Himalayas.
It is a small bay backed by tumbled cliffs. A shelving beach can be deduced from contour and occasional boulders big enough to stick through the snow that smothers it all. A sort of mess of rocks and mud at the back may be glacial moraine. Over the sea the ice is split in all directions by jagged rifts and channels; the whole thing is a bit like Antarctica but nothing is high enough or white enough to uplift the spirit, it looks not only chilly but kind of mean.
"This place," says the colonel, "is the only one, about which we have any topographical information, that seems to meet the requirements.
Got to know about it through an elementary planetography. One of the observers had the sense to see we might need something of the sort.
This place"--the stereo jigs as he taps his projector--"seems it"s the center of a rising movement in the crust ... that"s not to the point.
Neither side has bothered to claim the land at the poles...."
I see their point if it"s all like this--
"... And a ship trying to land on those cliffs might very well pitch over into the sea. That is, if she were trying to land on emergency rockets."
Rockets--that brings home the ancientness of this ship _Gilgamesh_--but after all the ships that settled Incognita probably carried emergency rockets, too.
This settled, the meeting turns into a briefing session and merges imperceptibly with the beginning of the job.
The job of course is Faking the background of the crash; working out the past history and present aims of the Lost Kafoozalum. We have to invent a planet and what"s more difficult convey all the essential information about it by the sort of sideways hints you gather among peoples" personal possessions; diaries, letters et cetera; and what is even _more_ difficult we have to leave out anything that could lead to definite identification of our unknown world with any known one.
We never gave that world a name; it might be dangerous. Who speaks of their world by name, except to strangers? They call it "home"--or "Earth," as often as not.
Some things have been decided for us. Language, for instance--one of two thousand or so Earth tongues that went out of use late enough to be plausible as the main language of a colonized planet. The settlers on Incognita were not of the sort to take along dictionaries of the lesser-known tongues, so the computers at Russett had a fairly wide choice.
We had to take a hypnocourse in that language. Ditto the script, one of several forgotten phonetic shorthands. (Designed to enable the tongues of Aliens to be written down; but the Aliens have never been met. It is plausible enough that some colony might have kept the script alive; after all Thasia uses something of the sort to this day.)
The final result of our work looks pretty small. Twenty-three "Personal Background Sets"--a few letters, a diary in some, an a.s.sortment of artifacts. Whoever stocked this ship we are on supplied wood, of the half-dozen kinds that have been taken wherever men have gone; stocks of a few plastics--known at the time of the Exodus, or easily developed from those known, and not a.s.sociated with any particular planet. Also books on Design, a Form-writer for translating drawings into materials, and so on. Someone put in a lot of work before this voyage began.
Most of the time it is like being back on Russet doing a group Project. What we are working on has no more and no less reality than that. Our work is all read into a computer and checked against everybody else"s. At first we keep clashing. Gradually a consistent picture builds up and gets translated finally into the Personal Background Kits. The Lost Kafoozalum start to exist like people in a History book.
Fifteen days hard work and we have just about finished; then we reach--call it Planet Gilgamesh.
I wake in my bunk to hear that there will be brief cessation of weight; strap down, please.
We are coming off Ma.s.s-Time to go on planetary drive.
Colonel Delano-Smith is in charge of operations on the planet, with Ram and Peter to a.s.sist. None of the rest of us see the melting out of fifty years" acc.u.mulation of ice, the pumping away of the water, the fitting and testing of the holds for the grappling-beams. We stay inside the ship, on five-eighths gee which we do not have time to get used to, and try to work, and discard the results before the computer can do so. There is hardly any work left to do, anyway.
It takes nearly twelve hours to get the ship free, and caulked, and ready to lift. (Her hull has to be patched because of Mr. Yardo"s operations which make use of several sorts of vapors). Then there is a queer blind period with Up now one way, now another, and sudden jerks and tugs that upset everything not in gimbals or tied down; interspersed with periods when weightlessness supervenes with no warning at all. After an hour or two of this it would be hard to say whether Mental or physical discomfort is more acute; B consulted, however, says my autonomic system must be quite something, after five minutes _her_ thoughts were with her viscera entirely.
Then, suddenly, we are back on Ma.s.s-Time again.
Two days to go.
At first being on Ma.s.s-Time makes everything seem normal again. By sleep time there is a strain, and next day it is everywhere. I know as well as any that on Ma.s.s-Time the greater the ma.s.s the faster the shift; all the same I cannot help feeling we are being slowed, dragged back by the dead ship coupled to our live one.
When you stand by the hull _Gilgamesh_ is only ten feet away.
I should have kept something to work on like B and Kirsty who have not done their Letters for Home in Case of Accidents; mine is signed and sealed long ago. I am making a good start on a Neurosis when Delano-Smith announces a Meeting for one hour ahead.
Hurrah! now there is a time-mark fixed I think of all sorts of things I should have done before; for instance taking a look at the controls of the Hoppers.
I have been in one of them half an hour and figured out most of the dials--Up down and sideways are controlled much as in a helicar, but here a big viewscreen has been hooked in to the autopilot--when across the hold I see the air lock start to move.
_Gilgamesh_ is on the other side.