Leinster, Murray - First Contact

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First Contact

TOMMY DORT WENT into the captain’s room with his last pair of stereophotos and said:

“I’m through, sir. These are the last two pictures I can take.”

He handed over the photographs and looked with professional interest at the visiplates

which showed all space outside the ship. Subdued, deep-red lighting indicated the controls and

such instruments as the quartermaster on duty needed for navigation of the spaceship Lianvabon.

There was a deeply cushioned control chair. There was the little gadget of oddly angled

mirrors—remote descendant of the back-view mirrors of twentieth-century motorists—which allowed a

view of all the visiplates without turning the head. And there were the huge plates which were so

much more satisfactory for a direct view of space.

The Lianvabon was a long way from home. The plates, which showed every star of visual

magnitude and could be stepped up to any desired magnification, portrayed stars of every

imaginable degree of brilliance, in the startlingly different colors they show outside of

atmosphere. But every one was unfamiliar. Only two constellations could be recognized as seen from

Earth, and they were shrunken and distorted. The Milky Way seemed vaguely out of place. But even

such oddities were minor compared to a sight in the forward plates.

There was a vast, vast mistiness ahead. A luminous mist. It seemed motionless. It took a

long time for any appreciable nearing to appear in the vision plates, though the spaceship’s

velocity indicator showed an incredible speed. The mist was the Crab Nebula, six light-years long,

three and a half light-years thick, with outward-reaching members that in the telescopes of Earth

gave it some resemblance to the creature for which it was named. It was a cloud of gas, infinitely

tenuous, reaching half again as far as from Sol to its nearest neighbor-sun. Deep within it burned

two stars; a double star; one component the familiar yellow of the sun of Earth, the other an

unholy white.

Tommy Dort said meditatively:

“We’re heading into a deep, sir?”

The skipper studied the last two plates of Tommy’s taking, and put them aside. He went

back to his uneasy contemplation of the vision plates ahead. The Lianvabon was decelerating at

full force. She was a bare half light-year from the nebula. Tommy’s work was guiding the ship’s

course, now, but the work was done. During all the stay of the exploring ship in the nebula, Tommy

Dort would loaf. But he’d more than paid his way so far.

He had just completed a quite unique first—a complete photographic record of the movement

of a nebula during a period of four thousand years, taken by one individual with the same

apparatus and with cdntrol exposures to detect and record any systematic errors. It was an

achievement in itself worth the journey from Earth. But in addition, he had also recorded four

thousand years of the history of a double star, and four thousand years of the history of a star

in the act of degenerating into a white dwarf.

It was not that Tommy Dort was four thousand years old. He was, actually, in his twenties.

But the Crab Nebula is four thousand light-years from Earth, and the last two pictures had been

taken by light which would not reach Earth until the sixth millennium A.D. On the way here—at

speeds incredible multiples of the speed of light—Tommy Dort had recorded each aspect of the

nebula by the light which had left it from forty centuries since to a bare six months ago.

The Lianvabon bored on through space. Slowly, slowly, slowly, the incredible luminosity

crept across the vision plates. It blotted out half the universe from view. Before was glowing

mist, and behind was a star-studded emptiness. The mist shut off three-fourths of all the stars.

Some few of the brightest shone dimly through it near its edge, but only a few. Then there was

only an irregularly shaped patch of darkness astern against which stars shone unwinking. The

Lianvabon dived into the nebula, and it seemed as if it bored into a tunnel of darkness with walls

of shining fog.

Which was exactly what the spaceship was doing. The most distant photographs of all had

disclosed structural features in the nebula. It was not amorphous. It had form. As the Lianvabon

drew nearer, indications of structure grew more distinct, and Tommy Dort had argued for a curved

approach for photographic reasons. So the spaceship had come up to the nebula on a vast

logarithmic curve, and Tommy had been able to take successive photographs from slightly different

angles and get stereopairs which showed the nebula in three dimensions; which disclosed billowings

and hollows and an actually complicated shape. In places, the nebula displayed convolutions like

those of a human brain. It was into one of those hollows that the spaceship now plunged. They had

been called “deeps” by analogy with crevasses in the ocean floor. And they promised to be useful.

The skipper relaxed. One of a skipper’s functions, nowadays, is to think of things to

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worry about, and then to worry about them. The skipper of the Lianvabon was conscientious. Only

after a certain instrument remained definitely nonregistering did he ease himself back in his

seat.

“It was just hardly possible,” he said heavily, “that those deeps might be nonluminous

gas. But they’re empty. So we’ll be able to use overdrive as long as we’re in them.”

It was a light-year-and-a-half from the edge of the nebula to the neighborhood of the

double star which was its heart. That was the problem. A nebula is a gas. It is so thin that a

comet’s tail is solid by comparison, but a ship traveling on overdrive—above the speed of light

does not want to hit even a merely hard vacuum. It needs pure emptiness, such as exists between

the stars. But the Lianvabon could not do much in this expanse of mist if it was limited to speeds

a merely hard vacuum would permit.

The luminosity seemed to close in behind the spaceship, which slowed and slowed and

slowed. The overdrive went off with the sudden pinging sensation which goes all over a person when

the overdrive field is released.

Then, almost instantly, bells burst into clanging, strident uproar all through the ship.

Tommy was almost deafened by the alarm bell which rang in the captain’s room before the quarter

master shut it off with a flip of his hand. But other bells could be heard ringing throughout the

rest of the ship, to be cut off as automatic doors closed one by one.

Tommy Dort stared at the skipper. The skipper’s hands clenched. He was up and staring over

the quartermaster’s shoulder. One indicator was apparently having convulsions. Others strained to

record their findings. A spot on the diffusedly bright mistiness of a bowquartering visiplate grew

brighter as the automatic scanner focused on it. That was the direction of the object which had

sounded collision-alarm. But the object locator itself—according to its reading, there was one

solid object some eighty thousand miles away—an object of no great size. But there was another

object whose distance varied from extreme range to zero, and whose size shared its impossible

advance and retreat.

“Step up the scanner,” snapped the skipper.

The extra-bright spot on the scanner rolled outward, obliterating the undifferentiated

image behind it. Magnification increased. But nothing appeared. Absolutely nothing. Yet the radio

locator insisted that something. monstrous and invisible made lunatic dashes toward the Lianvabon,

at speeds which inevitably implied collision, and then fled coyly away at the same rate.

The visiplate went up to maximum magnification. Still nothing. The skipper ground his

teeth. Tommy Dort said meditatively:

“D’you know, sir, I saw something like this on a liner of the Earth—Mars run once, when we

were being located by another ship. Their locator beam was the same frequency as ours, and every

time it hit, it registered like something monstrous, and solid.”

“That,” said the skipper savagely, “is just what’s happening now. There’s something like a

locator beam on us. We’re getting that beam and our, own echo besides. But the other ship’s

invisible! Who is out here in an invisible ship with locator devices? Not men, certainly!”

He pressed the button in his sleeve communicator and snapped:

“Action stations! Man all weapons! Condition of extreme alert in all departments

immediately!”

His hands closed and unclosed. He stared again at the visiplate, which showed nothing but

a formless brightness.

“Not men?” Tommy Dort straightened sharply. “You mean—”

“How many solar systems in our galaxy?” demanded the skipper bitterly. “How many planets

fit for life? And how many kinds of life could there be? If this ship isn’t from Earth—and it

isn’t—it has a crew that isn’t human. And things that aren’t human but are up to the level of deep-

space travel in their civilization could mean anything!”

The skipper’s hands were actually shaking. He would not have talked so freely before a

member of his own crew, but Tommy Dort was of the observation staff. And even a skipper whose

duties include worrying may sometimes need desperately to unload his worries. Sometimes, too, it

helps to think aloud.

“Something like this has been talked about and speculated about for years,” he said

soffly. “Mathematically, it’s been an odds-on bet that somewhere in our galaxy there’d be another

race with, a civilization equal to or further advanced than ours. Nobody could ever guess where -

or when we’d meet them. But it looks like we’ve done it now!”

Tommy’s eyes were very bright.

“D’you suppose they’ll be friendly, sir?”

The skipper glanced at the distance indicator. The phantom object still made its insane,

nonexistent swoops toward and away from the Lianvabon. The secondary indication of an object at

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