James Blish - Earth of Hours

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2024-11-19 1 0 44.86KB 15 页 5.9玖币
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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/James%20Blish%20-%20Earth%20of%20Hours.txt
This Earth of Hours
THE ADVANCE squadron was coming into line as Master
Sergeant Oberholzer came onto the bridge of the Novae
Washingtongrad, saluted, and stood stiffly to the left of Lieu-
tenant Campion, the exec, to wait for orders. The bridge
was crowded and crackling with tension, but after twenty
years in the Marines it was all old stuff to Oberholzer. The
Hobo (as most of the enlisted men called her, out of earshot
of the brass) was at the point of the formation, as befitted
a virtually indestructible battleship already surfeited with
these petty conquests. The rest of the cone was sweeping
on ahead, in the swift enveloping maneuver which had
reduced so many previous planets before they had been able
to understand what was happening to them.
This time, the planet at the focus of all those shifting
conic sections of raw naval power was a place called Calle.
It was showing now on a screen that Oberholzer could see,
turning as placidly as any planet turned when you were too far
away from it to see what guns it might be pointing at you.
Lieutenant Campion was watching it too, though he had to
look out of the very corners of his eyes to see it at all.
If the exec were caught watching the screen instead of
the meter board assigned to him, Captain Hammer would
probably reduce him to an ensign. Nevertheless, Campion
never took his eyes off the image of Calle. This one was
going to be rough.
Captain Hammer was watching, too. After a moment he
said, "Sound!" in a voice like sandpaper.
"By the pulse six, sir," Lieutenant Spring's voice murmured
from the direction of the 'scope. His junior, a very raw
youngster named Rover, passed him a chit from the plotting
table. "For that read: By the birefs five eight nine, sir,"
the invisible navigator corrected.
Oberholzer listened without moving while Captain Ham-
mer muttered under his breath to Flo-Mar 12-Upjohn, the
only civilian allowed on the bridgeand small wonder,
since he was the Consort of State of the Matriarchy itself.
Hammer had long ago become accustomed enough to his
own bridge to be able to control who overheard him, but
12-Upjohn's answering whisper must have been audible to
every man there.
'The briefing said nothing about a second inhabited
planet," the Consort said, a little peevishly. "But then
there's very little we do know about this systemthat's
part of our trouble. What makes you think it's a colony?"
"A colony from Calle, not one of ours," Hammer said,
in more or less normal tones; evidently he had decided
against trying to keep only half of the discussion private.
"The electromagnetic 'noise' from both planets has the same
spectrumthe energy level, the output, is higher on Calle,
that's all. That means similar machines being used in similar
ways. And let me point out, Your Excellency, that the outer
planet is in opposition to Calle now, which will put it
precisely in our rear if we complete this maneuver."
"When we complete this maneuver," 12-Upjohn said
firmly. "Is there any evidence of communication between
the two planets?"
Hammer frowned. "No," he admitted.
"Then we'll regard the colonization hypothesis as unproved
and stand ready to strike back hard if events prove us
wrong. I think we have a sufficient force here to reduce
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three planets like Calle if we're driven to that pitch."
Hammer grunted and resigned the argument. Of course it
was quite possible that 12-Upjohn was right; he did not lack
for experiencein fact, he wore the Silver Barring, as the
most-traveled Consort of State ever to ride the Standing
Wave. Nevertheless Oberholzer repressed a sniff with difficulty.
Like all the military, he was a colonial; he had never seen
the Earth, and never expected to; and, both as a colonial
and as a Marine who had been fighting the Matriarchy's
battles all his adult life, he was more than a little contemp-
tuous of Earthmen, with their tandem names and all that
they implied. Of course it was not the Consort of State's fault
that he had been born on Earth, and so had been named
only Marvin 12 out of the misfortune of being a male; nor
that he had married into Florence Upjohn's cabinet, that
being the only way one could become a cabinet member,
and Marvin 12 having been taught from birth to believe
such a post the highest honor a man might covet. All the
same, neither 12-Upjohn nor his entourage of drones filled
Oberholzer with confidence.
Nobody, however, had asked M. Sgt. Richard Oberholzer
what he thought, and nobody was likely to. As the chief
of all the non-Navy enlisted personnel on board the Hobo,
he was expected to be on the bridge when matters were
ripening toward criticality; but his duty there was to listen,
not to proffer advice. He could not in fact remember any
occasion when an officer had asked his opinion, though he
had receivedand executedhis fair share of near-suicidal
orders from bridges long demolished.
"By the pulse five point five," Lieutenant Spring's voice
sang.
"Sergeant Oberholzer," Hammer said.
"Aye, sir."
"We are proceeding as per orders. You may now brief
your men and put them into full battle gear."
Oberholzer saluted and went below. There was little enough
he could tell the squadas 12-Upjohn had said, Calle's
system was nearly unknownbut even that little would
improve the total ignorance in which they had been kept
till now. Luckily, they were not much given to asking ques-
tions of a strategic sort; like impressed spacehands every-
where, the huge mass of the Matriarchy's interstellar holdings
meant nothing to them but endlessly riding the Standing
Wave, with battle and death lurking at the end of every
jump. Luckily also, they were inclined to trust Oberholzer,
if only for the low cunning he had shown in keeping most
of them alive, especially in the face of unusually Crimean
orders from the bridge.
This time Oberholzer would need every ounce of trust and
erg of obedience they would give him. Though he never ex-
pected anything but the worst, he had a queer cold feeling
that this time he was going to get it. There were hardly
any data to go on yet, but there had been something about
Calle that looked persuasively like the end of the line.
Very few of the forty men in the wardroom even looked
up as Oberholzer entered. They were checking their gear
in the dismal light of the fluorescents, with the single-mind-
edness of men to whom a properly wound gun-tube coil, a
properly set face-shield gasket, a properly fueled and focused
vaulting jet, have come to mean more than parents, children,
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retirement pensions, the rule of law, or the logic of empire.
The only man to show any flicker of interest was Sergeant
Cassiriras was normal, since he was Oberholzer's under-
studyand he did no more than look up from over the
straps of his antigas suit and say, "Well?"
"Well," Oberholzer said, "now hear this."
There was a sort of composite jingle and clank as the
men lowered their gear to the deck or put it aside on their
bunks.
"We're investing a planet called Calle in the Canes
Venatici cluster," Oberholzer said, sitting down on an olive-
drab canvas pack stuffed with lysurgic acid grenades. "A
cruiser called the Assam Dragonyou were with her on her
shakedown, weren't you, Himber?touched down here ten
years ago with a flock of tenders and got swallowed up.
They got two or three quick yells for help out and that was
thatnothing anybody could make much sense of, no wea-
pons named or description of the enemy. So here we are,
loaded for the kill."
"Wasn't any Galley in command of the Assam Dragon
when I was aboard," Himber said doubtfully.
"Nah. Place was named for the astronomer who spotted
her, from the rim of the cluster, a hundred years ago,"
Oberholzer said. "Nobody names planets for ship captains.
Anybody got any sensible questions?"
"Just what kind of trouble are we looking for?" Cassirir
said.
"That's just it we don't know. This is closer to the
center of the Galaxy than we've ever gotten before. It
may be a population center too; could be that Calle is just
one piece of a federation, at least inside its own cluster.
That's why we've got the boys from Momma on board; this
one could be damn important."
Somebody sniffed. "If this cluster is full of people, how
come we never picked up signals from it?"
"How do you know we never did?" Oberholzer retorted.
"For all I know, maybe that's why the Assam Dragon came
here in the first place. Anyhow that's not our problem. All
we're"
The lights went out. Simultaneously, the whole mass of
the Novoe Washingtongrad shuddered savagely, as though a
boulder almost as big as she was had been dropped on her.
Seconds later, the gravity went out too.
2
Flo-Mar 12-Upjohn knew no more of the real nature of
the disaster than did the wardroom squad, nor did anybody
on the bridge, for that matter. The blow had been inde-
tectable until it struck, and then most of the fleet was
simply annihilated; only the Hobo was big enough to survive
the blow, and she survived only partiallyin fact, in five
pieces. Nor did the Consort of State ever know by what
miracle the section he was in hit Calle still partially under
power; he was not privy to the self-salvaging engineering
principles of battleships. All he knewonce he struggled
back to consciousnesswas that he was still alive, and that
there was a broad shaft of sunlight coming through a top-
to-bottom split in one wall of what had been his office
aboard ship.
He held his ringing head for a while, then got up in
search of water. Nothing came out of the dispenser, so he
unstrapped his dispatch case from the underside of his desk
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and produced a pint palladium flask of vodka. He had
screwed up his face to sample thisat the moment he
would have preferred waterwhen a groan reminded him
that there might be more than one room in his suddenly
shrunken universe, as well as other survivors.
He was right on both counts. "Though the ship section he
was in consisted mostly of engines of whose function he had
no notion, there were also three other staterooms. Two of
these were deserted, but the third turned out to contain a
battered member of his own staff, by name Robin One.
The young man was not yet conscious and 12-Up]'ohn
regarded him with a faint touch of despair. Robin One was
perhaps the last man in space that the Consort of State
would have chosen to be shipwrecked with.
That he was utterly expendable almost went without say-
ing; he was, after all, a drone. When the perfection of
sperm electrophoresis had enabled parents for the first time
to predetermine the sex of their children, the predictable
result had been an enormous glut of maleswhich was
directly accountable for the present regime 6n Earth. By the
time the people and the lawmakers, thoroughly frightened
by the crazy years of fashion upheavals, "beefcake," poly-
andry, male prostitution, and all the rest, had come to their
senses, the Matriarchy was in to stay; a weak electric
current had overturned civilized society as drastically as the
steel knife had demoralized the Eskimos.
Though the tide of excess males had since receded some-
what, it had left behind a wrack, of which Robin One was
a bubble. He was a drone, and hence superfluous by defini-
tionfit only to be sent colonizing, on diplomatic missions
or otherwise thrown away.
Superfluity alone, of course, could hardly account for his
presence on 12-Upjohn's staff. Officially, Robin One was an
interpreter; actuallysince nobody could know the language
the Consort of State might be called upon to understand on
this missionhe was a poet, a class of unattached males
with special privileges in the Matriarchy, particularly if
what they wrote was of the middling-difficult or Hillyer So-
ciety sort. Robin One was an eminently typical member of
this class, distractible, sulky, jealous, easily wounded, homo-
sexual, lazy except when writing, and probably (to give him
the benefit of the doubt, for 12-Upjohn had no ear whatever
for poetry) the second-worst poet of his generation.
It had to be admitted that assigning 12-UpJ'ohn a poet
as an interpreter on this mission had not been a wholly
bad idea, and that if Hildegard MuUer of the Interstellar Un-
derstanding Commission had not thought of it, no mere male
would have been likely toleast of all Bar-Rob 4-Agberg,
Director of Assimilation. The nightmare of finding the whole
of the center of the Galaxy organized into one vast federation,
much older than Earth's, had been troubling the State De-
partment for a long time, at first from purely theoretical
considerationsall those heart-stars were much older than
those in the spiral arms, and besides, where star density in
space is so much higher, interstellar travel does not look like
quite so insuperable an obstacle as it long had to Earthmen
and later from certain practical signs, of which the obliter-
ation of the Assam Dragon and her tenders had been only
the most provocative. Getting along with these people on the
first contact would be vital, and yet the language barrier
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might well provoke a tragedy wanted by neither side, as the
obliteration of Nagasaki in World War II had been provoked
by the mistranslation of a single word. Under such circum-
stances, a man with a feeling for strange words in odd rela-
tionships might well prove to be useful, or even vital.
Nevertheless, it was with a certain grim enjoyment that
12-Upjohn poured into Robin One a good two-ounce jolt
of vodka. Robin coughed convulsively and sat up, blinking.
"Your Excellencyhowwhat's happened? I thought we
were dead. But we've got lights again, and gravity."
He was observant, that had to be granted. "The lights are
ours but the gravity is Calle's," 12-Upjohn explained tersely.
"We're in a part of the ship that cracked up."
"Well, it's good that we've got power."
"We can't afford to be philosophical about it. Whatever
shape it's in, this derelict is a thoroughly conspicuous object
and we'd better get out of it in a hurry."
"Why?" Robin said. "We were supposed to make contact
with these people. Why not just sit here until they notice
and come to see us?"
"Suppose they just blast us to smaller bits instead? They
didn't stop to parley with the fleet, you'll notice."
"This is a different situation," Robin said stubbornly.
"I wouldn't have stopped to parley with that fleet myself, if
I'd had the means of knocking it out first. It didn't look a bit
like a diplomatic mission. But why should they be afraid of
a piece of a wreck?"
The Consort of State stroked the back of his neck re-
flectively. The boy had a point. It was risky; on the other
hand, how long would they survive foraging in completely
unknown territory? And yet obviously they couldn't stay
cooped up in here foreverespecially if it was true that there
was already no water.
He was spared having to make up his mind by a halloo
from the direction of the office. After a startled stare at
each other, the two hit the deck running.
Sergeant Oberholzer's face was peering grimly through
the split in the bulkhead.
"Oho," he said. "So you did make it." He said something
unintelligible to some invisible person outside, and then
squirmed through the breach into the room, with consider-
able difficulty, since he was in full battle gear. "None of
the officers did, so I guess that puts you in command."
"In command of what?" 12-Upjohn said dryly.
"Not very much," the Marine admitted. "I've got five
men surviving, one of them with a broken hip, and a section
of the ship with two drive units in it. It would lift, more or
less, if we could jury-rig some controls, but I don't know
where we'd go in it without supplies or a navigatoror an
overdrive, for that matter." He looked about speculatively.
"There was a Standing Wave transceiver in this section, I
think, but ifd be a miracle if it still functioned."
"Would you know how to test it?" Robin asked.
"No. Anyhow we've got more immediate business than
that. We've picked up a native. What's more, he speaks
Englishmust have picked it up from the Assam Dragon. We
started to ask him questions, but it turns out he's some
sort of top official, so we brought him over here on the off
chance that one of you was alive."
"What a break!" Robin One said explosively.
"A whole series of them," 12-Upjohn agreed, none too
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